Office of the Independent Blogger

We were discussing, a few friends and I, the VA Tech shooting and I said, “What bothers me is all the policemen standing outside the building doing nothing,” after a friend had said, “The police chief and the School President have blood on their hands.”

Another friend said, “Great plan, charge in guns blazing” and I had this to say:

Listen. Policemen can’t protect your home when it’s broken into; all they can do is take 3 hours to get to your house to file a ten minute police report that will never be seen again. They can’t protect you from rape; they can simply take a report that’ll rot in their desks. They can’t protect you from being killed by your wife in your sleep; they can only pick up the pieces. And that’s all well and good, because for the most part, policemen are paperweights and historians; they’re people who like to pull other people over and send them to prison for forty years because they’ve got a dimebag of marijuana in their coat. They’re people who ride around in shiny cars and stop people for driving too fast on the expressway, which is fine. It’s a job, I suppose, and it’s something to do, but let me say: if they can’t do something when people are being shot forty feet from them inside of a building, they are useless to society instead of just a nuisance to it.

Does anyone disagree? I just think it’s crazy that cops would stand outside idly doing nothing while people are being shot. I guess if people were selling marijuana or playing loud music they’d be all over it. A cop’s job is to “serve and protect” — at least, that’s what the plastic cars say in blue letters here in Chicago, and so I believe that they should’ve gone in guns up ready to shoot to break it up. The police chief, and the policemen, should all be ashamed: the chief for not ordering action, and the policemen for obeying his non-orders.

“Oh, but the police officers’ lives are important! You can’t jeopardize that!”
Damn if any police officer is more valuable than the people he is supposed to PROTECT.
Reminds me of 9/11: Bush sitting there reading My Pet Goat instead of getting up, saying, “Kids, a Presidential situation has come up that needs to be taken care of immediately. Be good to yours mothers, take care, goodbye!” and left.

But you can’t disturb the kids, can you?
You can only stand outside while they’re being slaughtered.

More trouble in Iraq. Why isn’t al-Sadr dead? Why wasn’t he killed when he first started his War?

More proof that we are not in control and haven’t been for a long time. Neither is the Iraqi “government.”

Today’s shooting at Virginia Tech was terrible. I don’t blame the University for it, though. Their reasoning — first incident: domestic dispute — is totally reasonable.

How anyone could do this is beyond me. That people will do this, isn’t, and it’s a terrible thing to know.

I really don’t believe that Mitt Romney has a chance to be nominated by the Republicans but The Donors are trying to make it awfully hard on the Grand Old Party: Romney has raised twice as much as McCain, and a handful million more than Giuliani. Money helps win but I seriously doubt that Mitt wins.

Hell of a hard choice for the Republicans, though. “Do we vote for the candidate who doesn’t suport our party’s stances half the time? Do we vote for the candidate that believes Iraq is going well? Do we vote for the — gasp! — Mormon?”

Where do they go now? Where do they go?

The Senior Senator from New Mexico begged the White House to fire a US Attorney, and they did. One of the interesting things about it, though, is that it says that Republican activists also were pining for his release.

What type of Republican activist sits around banging on the war drums against a US Attorney?

Now I’ve got two apolotical notes. Mobile phones are killing bees, and Chicago topped LA to be the US designee for the Olympics in 2016. I think Chicago is now the frontrunner, as it’s the best city of those competing. Which is easy when you’re the best city in the world!

Karl Rove’s emails are missing.

Yesterday, congressional Democrats denounced the White House after administration officials acknowledged this week that e-mails dealing with official government business, including the firing of U.S. attorneys, may have been lost because they were improperly sent through political messaging accounts. Twenty-two White House officials — and a total of about 50 over the course of the administration — have been given such accounts to avoid doing political work on government equipment. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, accused the White House of lying about the matter. He was joined by the ranking Republican on the committee, Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), in calling on the White House to join Congress in setting up a “fair and objective process for investigating this matter.”

“You can’t erase e-mails, not today,” Leahy said in an angry speech on the Senate floor. “They’ve gone through too many servers. Those e-mails are there — they just don’t want to produce them. It’s like the infamous 18-minute gap in the Nixon White House tapes.” White House officials rejected that explanation. “What we have done has been forthcoming, honest,” spokeswoman Dana Perino said. “We are trying to understand to the best of our ability the universe of the e-mails that were potentially lost, and we are taking steps to make sure that we use the forensics that are available to retrieve any of those that are lost.”

Dana Perino says, “We have done [is] forthcoming,” but what he really means is, “We’re going to stall and pretend that all’s well until the public has a shiny new toy to play with.” It’s so dishonest and obnoxious and wrong, I hate it, not just because I feel they’ll get away without impeachment, which Bush deserves, but because I know that Karl Rove won’t be fired. What he did, what he does, is with the complete consent of the President.

The other day I wrote about pets and the pet food recall. I’m glad to read that the Senate, including Robert Byrd, feels the same. I half-expected him to start saying, “You can’t just have petfood that kills animals. It’s wrong, and that’s why we have rules, that’s why we have rules, that’s why we have rules!!” (Wink, J.)

Although now that I think of it, Why do we have rules? Nobody ever enforces them.

The great tragedy of the Clinton Impeachment was that it was in a very real way self-inflicted. The Republicans were looking to Impeach him and the case they formed was nonsense and wouldn’t even meet the high crimes and misdemeanors standard in Texas, but he did it to himself and he knows that to be true. By lying to the Independent Counsel about Lewinsky when he should’ve known that he was being asked for a very real reason, he made his own trial and damaged a fair Presidency, perhaps beyond repair.

Now Paul Wolfowitz is in the same boat after he transfered his girlfriend to the State Department and keep her on the payroll.

The events injected a new ugliness into what had already been a bitter rift between Mr. Wolfowitz and many of the bank’s employees, who have questioned his suitability for the job as a former deputy secretary of defense and architect of the Iraq war, and have challenged many of his policies at the bank, especially those cracking down on corruption in which he suspended aid to several countries without consulting the board. The World Bank’s 24-member executive board, the body that elected Mr. Wolfowitz to the job after he was nominated by President Bush in 2005, held hurried meetings throughout the day amid mounting speculation that it might reprimand him or ask him to resign.

But shortly after 10 p.m. a bank official released a statement from Mr. Wolfowitz to the board members saying that “in the interests of transparency,” he was requesting the “immediate public release of all documents related to the board’s current review of the case involving myself and Ms. Riza.” The statement appeared to reflect a concern by the bank president that he was being tarred by selective leaks. The board was also reported to be meeting late into the evening over what further information to make public about the matter. Whatever the outcome, the controversy appeared certain to produce more meetings and engulf delegates at the annual spring session of finance ministry officials in Washington, sponsored by the bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Mr. Wolfowitz apologized at a morning news conference and at the atrium meeting after the staff association disclosed that it had found a dated memorandum from Mr. Wolfowitz to a vice president for human resources at the bank, apparently instructing him to agree to the terms of a raise and reassignment for Ms. Riza. The transfer and a subsequent raise eventually took her to a pay of $193,590 from $132,660, tax-free because of her status as a diplomat, and exceeding the salaries of cabinet members. “In hindsight, I wish I had trusted my original instincts and kept myself out of the negotiations,” Mr. Wolfowitz said.

“I made a mistake, for which I am sorry,” he added, pleading for “some understanding” of the “painful personal dilemma” he faced when he left the Pentagon to become bank president. Mr. Wolfowitz said he had been seeking to avoid a conflict of interest by having Ms. Riza, with whom he had a personal relationship, transferred from his supervision. What drove the anger at the bank was not that Mr. Wolfowitz had denied earlier that he had sought Ms. Riza’s transfer, but that he had been less than fully candid in discussing it until documents surfaced showing his direct role. His earlier insistence that he had consulted with ethics officials was disputed by some of them, who say they were not involved in the salary aspect of discussions.

Shame, it is, because he’s been a fairly good and effective President of the World Bank and now the Bank faces a crisis that it shouldn’t have to face, there’s further bad press in the world on American diplomats, and Bush might very well have to appoint someone new that won’t be anywhere near as qualified as Paul Wolfowitz.

Donald Rumsfeld, is, after all, looking for work.

If I were a Libertarian or a “small-government” Republican I’d be dying a little on the inside with every day that passes by as President Bush has either betrayed every Conservative ideal or never shared them to begin with and either is possible. I’ve known this for awhile as have most people for anyone who needs further evidence that the President hasn’t a clue, here.

The White House wants to appoint a high-powered czar to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies, but it has had trouble finding anyone able and willing to take the job, according to people close to the situation. At least three retired four-star generals approached by the White House in recent weeks have declined to be considered for the position, the sources said, underscoring the administration’s difficulty in enlisting its top recruits to join the team after five years of warfare that have taxed the United States and its military.

“Son, that’s what the Joint Chiefs of Staff are there for.” “Are you some kind of idiot?” “YOU’RE EXPANDING THE GOVERNMENT’S SIZE!” “You don’t listen to your advisors when they’re your normal advisors that you’re supposed to listen to. Why would you actually listen to a new council?” “I’ve got Golf.”

All responses given. I’ll bet, and I’d bet that Colin Powell was one of the men who declined, only asked for political purposes.

Just as bad, but with less negative consequence and more positive consequence, is this. Rudy Giuliani is terrible at running a Presidential campaign, which sucks for him but serves the rest of the country well. If he can be so incompetent that he won’t get nominated, he won’t get elected, so feel free to scare the public away, Rudy! You idiot.

Don Imus recently called the girls from Rutgers University’s basketball team “nappy-headed hoes” and said that they looked like mean girls with a bunch of tattoos. The predictable outcry occurred, politicians say they’ll never speak to him again, he’s offered to take the girls to dinner speak to them and apologize; they’ve accepted, and MSNBC will now stop airing his radio show on TV simultaneously each morning.

That’s okay, Imus. Nobody watches MSNBC anyway.

What bothers me about is all is that he said, “I’m sorry, it was a lame attempt to be funny,” basically, but the public is going crazy and are all the activists and he’s accepting their wrath. Look, man, you don’t have to apologize over and over for something. Once is enough, more than enough, but I don’t think you should have to apologize for a joke unless you say something like, “That dude’s got Weapons of Mass Destruction. We know where they are.” [Pause for punchline. Wait for it, wait for it…]

Disgusting.

Cases of kidney failure among cats rose by 30 percent during the three months that pet food contaminated with an industrial chemical was sold, one of the nation’s largest chains of veterinary hospitals reported Monday. Banfield, The Pet Hospital, said an analysis of its database, compiled from records collected by its more than 615 veterinary hospitals, suggests that three out of every 10,000 cats and dogs seen in its clinics developed kidney failure during the time the melamine-contaminated pet food was on the market. There are an estimated 60 million dogs and 70 million cats in the United States, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association.

The veterinary hospital chain saw 1 million dogs and cats during the three months when the more than 100 brands of now-recalled contaminated pet food were sold. It saw 284 extra cases of kidney failure among cats during that period, or a roughly 30 percent increase when compared with background rates. It’s not clear if those animals ate the contaminated food, though it seems likely. “It has meaning, when you see a peak like that. We see so many pets here, and it coincided with the recall period,” said veterinarian Hugh Lewis, who oversees the mining of Banfield’s database to do clinical studies. The chain continues to share its data with the Food and Drug Administration.

Absolutely sick. There ought to be stricter rules about pet food. For some people, pets are paramount, and nobody should have to lose a pet because the regulations are loose on their food, especially not when it comes to cats or dogs. Especially, and for the record, I’m not usually a “more regulation” kind of guy but this one is a no-brainer.

What a cliche, right?

Listen, these guys are crafty and evil. Craftier than Nixon’s men, although the Head is far stupider. Still, stories like these make you wonder how much they’ve gotten away with so far. When Karl Rove and his top deputies arrived at the White House in 2001, the Republican National Committee provided them with laptop computers and other communication devices to be used alongside their government-issued equipment.

The back-channel e-mail and paging system, paid for and maintained by the RNC, was designed to avoid charges that had vexed the Clinton White House — that federal resources were being used inappropriately for political campaign purposes. Now, that dual computer system is creating new embarrassment and legal headaches for the White House, the Republican Party and Rove’s once-vaunted White House operation. Democrats say evidence suggests the RNC e-mail system was used for political and government policy matters in violation of federal record preservation and disclosure rules.

In addition, Democrats point to a handful of e-mails obtained through ongoing inquiries suggesting the system may have been used to conceal such activities as contacts with lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who was convicted on bribery charges and is now in prison for fraud. Democratic congressional investigators are beginning to demand access to this RNC-White House communications system, which was used not only by Rove’s office but by several top officials elsewhere in the White House. The prospect that such communication might become public has further jangled the nerves of an already rattled Bush White House.

Some Republicans believe that the huge number of e-mails — many written hastily, with no thought that they might become public — may contain more detailed and unguarded inside information about the administration’s far-flung political activities than has previously been available. “There is concern about what may be in these e-mails,” said one GOP activist who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject. “The system was created with the best intentions,” said former Assistant White House Press Secretary Adam Levine, who was assigned an RNC laptop and BlackBerry when he worked at the White House in 2002. But, he added, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

There’s always something new with these guys, always, and it is absolutely appalling and disturbing.

George Bush nearly blew himself up this weekend. Really, I couldn’t make this up if I tried. Twenty thousand monkeys typing away couldn’t think this up!

Credit Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally with saving the leader of the free world from self-immolation.

Mulally told journalists at the New York auto show that he intervened to prevent President Bush from plugging an electrical cord into the hydrogen tank of Ford’s hydrogen-electric plug-in hybrid at the White House last week. Ford wanted to give the Commander-in-Chief an actual demonstration of the innovative vehicle, so the automaker arranged for an electrical outlet to be installed on the South Lawn and ran a charging cord to the hybrid. However, as Mulally followed Bush out to the car, he noticed someone had left the cord lying at the rear of the vehicle, near the fuel tank.

“I just thought, ‘Oh my goodness!’ So, I started walking faster, and the President walked faster and he got to the cord before I did. I violated all the protocols. I touched the President. I grabbed his arm and I moved him up to the front,” Mulally said. “I wanted the president to make sure he plugged into the electricity, not into the hydrogen This is all off the record, right?”

I say, Better he blow himself up than blow another country! Sorry Secret Service!

But to be clear, I don’t mean that as a threat. I clarify: I am not threatening the President. I’m nowhere near the threat to the President that he is to himself, and he’s nowhere near the threat to himself that he is to all of us.

May the History Gods have mercy on George W. Bush because I can’t. You can’t either. Listen, mate, stories like this typically take forever to come out but this is but one of many insider stories detailing the ineptitudes of this Administration. (Though Bush should thank God every day that Colin Powell is waiting to lay on his deathbed before speaking out about the War in Iraq.)

In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation’s “shocking” mismanagement of his country _ a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had “turned their backs on their would-be liberators.” “The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order,” Ali A. Allawi concludes in “The Occupation of Iraq,” newly published by Yale University Press. Allawi writes with authority as a member of that “new order,” having served as Iraq’s trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment. The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country’s four-year ordeal. It’s an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word “ignorance” crops up repeatedly.

First came the “monumental ignorance” of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without “the faintest idea” of Iraq’s realities. “More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society,” he writes. What followed was the “rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance” of the occupation, under L. Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which took big steps with little consultation with Iraqis, steps Allawi and many others see as blunders:

The Americans disbanded Iraq’s army, which Allawi said could have helped quell a rising insurgency in 2003. Instead, hundreds of thousands of demobilized, angry men became a recruiting pool for the resistance.

Purging tens of thousands of members of toppled President Saddam Hussein’s Baath party _ from government, school faculties and elsewhere _ left Iraq short on experienced hands at a crucial time.

An order consolidating decentralized bank accounts at the Finance Ministry bogged down operations of Iraq’s many state-owned enterprises.

The CPA’s focus on private enterprise allowed the “commercial gangs” of Saddam’s day to monopolize business.

Its free-trade policy allowed looted Iraqi capital equipment to be spirited away across borders.

The CPA perpetuated Saddam’s fuel subsidies, selling gasoline at giveaway prices and draining the budget.

[…]On U.S. reconstruction failures in electricity, health care and other areas documented by Washington’s own auditors Allawi writes that the Americans’ “insipid retelling of `success’ stories” merely hid “the huge black hole that lay underneath.”

This is about as bad as it gets.

Should’ve mentioned it sooner. Iran released the British sailors as a “diplomatic gesture,” which translates to: “The British told us in private that they’d bomb us into the Stone Age.” I’m glad to see that the situation resolved itself peacefully. I’m less glad to see people like Arianna Huffington use it as a chance to hate America first.

You know it’s been a strange week when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the most reasonable guy in the room. But while the president of Iran was preaching forgiveness and making the diplomatic gesture of releasing the 15 British sailors, the president of the United States was childishly, churlishly, and undiplomatically giving Congress, the Constitution, and the concept of advice and consent the finger with his recess appointments of Andrew Biggs, Susan Dudley, and Swift Boat donor Sam Fox.

You know that the President has the right to make “recess appointments” when he can’t get them confirmed by regular means. It’s sleazy, sure, but it’s nothing immoral and everybody does it in the White House for good reason. Sometimes, the President has to appoint them by recess. What bothers me about this is — the Iranians released hostages they’d been holding with no cause, and Huffington claims that Bush’s appointments — his appointments — are on the same level as Mahmoud Ahmaniac’s!?

She’s grasping at straws. But she was, after all, a Republican. Until it became chic to oppose Bush and make money by doing so.

Time to look at the Pope now.

Pope Benedict XVI decried suffering in much of the world in his Easter Sunday message, lamenting that “nothing positive” is happening in Iraq and voicing worry over unrest and instability in Afghanistan and bloodshed in parts of Africa and Asia.

“How many wounds, how much suffering there is in the world,” the pontiff said, delivering his traditional “Urbi et Orbi” Easter address from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica as tens of thousands of pilgrims and tourists listened in the square. Benedict read out a litany of troubling current events, saying he was thinking of the “terrorism and kidnapping of people, of the thousand faces of violence which some people attempt to justify in the name of religion, of contempt for life, of the violation of human rights and the exploitation of persons.”

“Afghanistan is marked by growing unrest and instability,” Benedict said. “In the Middle East, besides some signs of hope in the dialogue between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, nothing positive comes from Iraq, torn apart by continual slaughter as the civil population flees.” He singled out what he called the “catastrophic, and sad to say, underestimated, humanitarian situation” in Darfur as well as other African places of suffering, including violence and looting in Congo, fighting in Somalia — which, he said, drove away the prospect of peace — and the “grievous crisis” in Zimbabwe, marked by crackdowns on dissidents, a disastrous economy and severe corruption.

Is it just me or is that first paragraph awkward as a Bush misspeak?

Listen. I appreciate a good moralistic view of the world as much as anyone and moreso than most of my peers. Makes me wonder when Easter became a launching pad for political commentary, though. I’m going to Sox Park today and I’m taking a cousin for Kid’s Day. I’ve heard that the Easter Bunny will be there — am I going to have to endure a speech about the World Bank from him/her?!?!?!?!?!?

But on a less sarcastic note, what would the Church say, do you imagine, if one of the major powers went into Darfur and simply forced a peace? Probably nothing good, and it’s the same with all of these other situations. What would the Church do? Complain about violence, which they should, I suppose, considering that God != War (whatever George Bush says).

Overall, though, I agree with his words with regard to the suffering of man today.

Not sure I can blame Karzai, here.

President Hamid Karzai acknowledged for the first time Friday he has met with Taliban militants in attempts to bring peace to Afghanistan, which is struggling to quell a rising insurgency. Karzai’s assertion immediately rejected as false by a Taliban spokesman came as a suicide car bomber killed four people and wounded four others in Kabul, and militants overran a district in the volatile southeast. In the past, Karzai has offered, without success, to hold talks with the fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Omar and renegade warlord Gulbudin Hekmatyar. Some officials in his government, including provincial governors, are thought to have held informal talks with militants in the south and east, but with little apparent success to calm the insurgency.

“We have had representatives from the Taliban meeting with different bodies of Afghan government for a long time,” Karzai told a news conference. “I have had some Taliban coming to speak to me as well.” …Hundreds of former members of the hard-line Taliban regime, including a sprinkling of former senior commanders and officials, have reconciled with the government since they were ousted from power in the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. Current rebel leaders have apparently refused to hold talks, and in the past year, thousands more fighters have picked up guns and joined the insurgency, which in 2006 alone left some 4,000 people, mainly militants, dead.

Zabiullah Mujaheed, a purported spokesman for the militants, said that Taliban “do not want to talk to a puppet government.” “Karzai’s government has no power and all their policies are designed by America,” Mujaheed told The Associated Press by phone from an undisclosed location. “If the U.S. wants to negotiate with the Taliban, they should first leave our country.”

We’ve dropped the ball in Iraqhistan — in the War on Terror. Everybody knows it, and this is just a result. If we’d done what we were supposed to do, and that is fight our wars as if we genuinely meant to fight them, the opium trade in Afghanistan wouldn’t have revived and exploded and the Taliban wouldn’t still be fighting after more than five years.

Guess that ends our boasting that we accomplished in “one month” what the Russians and the British couldn’t in a year.

On the other front of our War on Terror, there’s terrible news. Namely: that terrorists are getting crafty in Iraq, and that’s a thought that should terrify every American that cares about our troops and Iraqi civilians.

A suicide truck bomb loaded with chlorine gas exploded in Ramadi on Friday, killing as many as 30 people, many of them children, a security official said. The explosion burned victims’ lungs, eyes and skin. Dr. Ali Abdullah Saleh, of the main Ramadi hospital, said 30 people had been admitted with shrapnel wounds and 15 had been sent to a second hospital in the city. He said 50 people had been admitted for breathing problems. It was at least the sixth chlorine bomb detonated in Anbar Province since late January and the most lethal, though it appears that most victims were killed by the explosion rather than the chlorine. Insurgents have also used chlorine bombs in the northern part of Baghdad, the capital, and near Taji, a town just north of here.

The attacker in Ramadi struck in the late morning of the Muslim day of prayer, when children off from school usually play in the street and adults run errands and visit before going to the mosque at midday. The truck, a fuel tanker loaded with the toxic gas, sped toward an Iraqi police checkpoint, according to witnesses and Col. Tareq al-Dulaimi, the head of security for Anbar Province. The police officers opened fire and the truck swerved toward a residential area, where the bomb exploded, he said.

Once the terrorists start the utilize chlorine and elements of the sort, they’ll possess deadly weapons that they can use anywhere at any time with great effectiveness. Makes me wonder why our homeland hasn’t been struck since 9/11 with such a weapon.