NMCI: A Lose-Lose Situation
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040318.html
NMCI, as it is rolling out today, has few boosters in the U.S. military. The transition has been awkward and far more expensive than it was supposed to have been. While someone may argue that NMCI has improved military readiness or saved money, it is almost impossible to prove either claim. It isn’t clear, in fact, that the U.S. Marines are still even a part of NMCI, though the Marines’ own NMCI web site doesn’t say that. What IS clear is that the whole NMCI experience is a prime example of how NOT to buy IT services.
Under NMCI, even moving a PC from one side of the room to another is supposed to require a call to EDS. But there are limits to NMCI. There can be no application development on NMCI machines, for example, so Navy software developers (they do exist) have to use the NMCI machine for e-mail and their old PC for writing code, with the two machines on completely different networks. So much for network simplification.
All of the NMCI machines run Windows 2000, which is supposed to increase network security. Yeah, right—as long as Linux boot floppies can be kept off the base.
Once NMCI is fully implemented, the Navy will have a whole new computer network owned by someone else. The Navy won’t be able to do anything it couldn’t do before, and because of forced application streamlining, there will be some things the Navy used to do with its PCs that it will no longer be able to do at all.
Salon.com | Dick Cheney’s glass house
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2004/03/20/cheney/
In his speech at the Reagan Library, Cheney insinuated that the likely Democratic nominee would prove “entirely inadequate” in the fight against international terrorism, because he supposedly doesn’t realize that we are “at war” with al-Qaida. In fact, Cheney himself is deeply vulnerable on this very point, if the Democrats have the courage to mention what he did—or, more important, didn’t do—in the months before Sept. 11, 2001.
It was Cheney who dismissed the warnings of truly imminent danger from the previous administration’s national security officials. It was Cheney who ignored the years of painstaking work by the Hart-Rudman Commission, insisting that he would chair his own anti-terror task force. It was Cheney who failed to act on that pledge between May 2001, when the president announced that he would head the administration’s counterterror effort, and September, when catastrophe struck. No wonder he tried to bully the Congress into abandoning any investigation of 9/11.
Cheney’s speech mocked Kerry’s alleged “consistency” in opposing new military weapons systems. Aside from the fact that this argument conflates opposition to specific weapons with votes in broader budgetary debates, Cheney is guilty of hypocrisy here too—as Democrats can demonstrate if they confront him. His speech specifically named “the Apache helicopter,” among other systems. Yet as defense secretary, he presided over substantial cuts to precisely the kinds of weapons systems he now chides the Massachusetts senator for opposing—including the Apache.
Indeed, Cheney killed several major weapons systems in those days—including the Navy’s a-12 Stealth fighter and the F-14D Tomcat fighter—sometimes against the fervent recommendations of the armed services chiefs. He cut total troop strength by a half-million and closed more than three dozen military bases. He built far fewer Stealth bombers than the Air Force had wanted and cut back the production of armored tanks. His final budget in 1992 proposed a five year, $50 billion reduction in total defense expenditures. In the argot of GOP propaganda, that can be made to sound like surrender.
At the time, all of those decisions surely seemed responsible to him and others in government. The end of the Cold War called for reductions in the massive military budgets of the Reagan era. But if the Republicans want to start playing patriot games about terror strategies and military spending, then they should find someone else to distort the meaning of votes cast 10 or 20 years ago. Dick Cheney is too vulnerable to make sneering remarks about anyone else’s record.
“Who cares what you think?”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/19/bush_encounter/
So when I had the chance to shake Bush’s hand, I said, “Mr. President, I’m very disappointed in your work so far. I hope you only serve four years.”
His smiling response was swift: “Who cares what you think?”
Rummy caught lying on Face the Nation
http://www.moveon.org/news/caughtoncamera.html
Watch Rumsfeld squirm. What is of most interest here is that his demeanor and body language while caught in a blatant, irrefutable lie are nearly indistinguishable from every other time I’ve seen him on camera. Pathological liar? You decide.
Sunday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld got caught blatantly contradicting his past statements, and we have the video clip…
Bush’s War is a Financial Disaster
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/031704J.shtml
Bush has stuck his head into a hornet’s nest. The U.S. will bleed men, money and reputation for a long time before it figures out how to get out of the first colonial misadventure of the 21st century.
9/11 Nonsense
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/031704A.shtml
One FAA agent delivered a security warning that was forwarded to the proper agency by the Senator who received it. Meanwhile, dozens of alarm bells were blaring in the White House, and especially in the Oval Office, about impending attacks using airplanes against prominent targets. This particular chapter of the 9/11 blame game would be uproariously hilarious if it were not so completely absurd.
The Pinocchio presidency
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/16/wilson_iraq/
Joe Wilson (yes, that Joe Wilson) takes issue with BushCo’s blatant lying.
...No more will we stand idly by while the president hides from the 9/11 commission. We will learn what he knew and when he knew it. We have already learned that it was the Bush White House that gave the orders to fly Osama bin Laden’s family and a suspected al-Qaida go-between out of the country in the days after 9/11 even as Americans were grounded.
No more will we stand idly by while the administration manipulates intelligence, like the Niger uranium fraud, or worse yet, uses manufactured intelligence from discredited sources to circumvent the necessary channels of government, forcing lies instead of facts to become the basis on which policy decisions are made. And we will not accept attempts to scapegoat the intelligence services when it is abundantly clear that the main problem is the perversion of the system by a few at the top, not the system itself. We will not accept the lies by Bush and his pack of surrogates that John Kerry is not committed to proper intelligence, when in fact it is this administration that has politicized and deranged intelligence to an unprecedented degree.
No more will we stand idly by while the administration blatantly lies about the reasons it went to war with Iraq, or about the costs of the occupation. This was not a war about weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, or even about the liberation of Iraq and the overthrow of a brutal tyrant. This was a war about “changing the dynamics” in the Middle East, as neoconservative William Kristol stated in a recent debate with me in Odessa, Texas. But we did not debate a “change the dynamics” war. That was not the reason Bush gave to our Congress when it voted on a war resolution. Our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, guardsmen, reservists, and their families deserve the truth from their government. As taxpayers, we deserve to know why $150 billion has been spent to put Ahmed Chalabi, a convicted bank embezzler, back in Baghdad—and why the Pentagon keeps financing his operations with U.S. dollars after he has openly boasted to having provided a stream of false information to government officials. We also deserve to know why Andrew Natsios, the head of the Agency for International Development, so badly miscalculated what we would be required to spend on the reconstruction of Iraq when he told Ted Koppel on ABC’s “Nightline” that our expenditures would not exceed $1.7 billion, total. Now we know the cost will run to hundreds of billions.
No more will we stand idly by while the Bush campaign lies about John Kerry’s record on defense and national security. The criticism of his vote to shut down the B-2 bomber program came about as the result of recommendations by then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and President George H.W. Bush. It is outrageous for the Bush-Cheney campaign to take that vote out of context, as it is outrageous to suggest that a unanimously adopted congressional resolution to return monies hidden away in the National Reconnaissance Office to the taxpayer is to be weak on national security…
George W. Bush: Flip-Flopper-In-Chief
George W. Bush: Flip-Flopper-In-Chief
D-bunker: setting the record straight
Kerry has responded to some of the more blatant BushCo distortions with a ”D-Bunker” blog.
‘Special’ Pentagon Unit Skirted CIA on Iraq
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/031104B.shtml
The disclosure suggests that the controversial Pentagon office played a greater role than previously understood in shaping the administration’s views on Iraq’s alleged ties to the terrorist network behind the Sept. 11 attacks, and bypassed usual channels to make a case that conflicted with the conclusions of CIA analysts.
Bush Sleepovers List
“Unknown Soldier” Speaks Out To Bring Troops Home
This is an interview with a soldier back from Iraq that is well worth reading. Here’s just one exerpt:
What did you think about President Bush�s Thanksgiving visit to Iraq?
I was there when President Bush came to the [Baghdad] airport. The day before, you had to fill out a questionnaire and answer questions, that would determine whether they would allow you in the room with the President.
What was on the questionnaire?
�Do you support the president?�
Really!
Yes.
Members of the military were asked whether they support the president politically?
Yes. And if the answer was not a gung-ho, A-1, 100 percent yes, then you were not allowed into the cafeteria. You were not allowed to eat the Thanksgiving meal that day. You had an MRE.
What�s an MRE?
Meals ready to eat. We also call them �meals refused by Ethiopians.�
About this questionnaire, it raises a serious question about whether military personnel, or civil servants for that matter, should ever be asked questions by their supervisors about their political beliefs. It also raises the whole question of freedom of speech. In particular, the circumstances under which members of the military have freedom of speech.
There is none.
Is a soldier free, for example, to speak to the media if it is in support of the president and his policies, but not free to do so if in opposition or if raising uncomfortable questions?
If you are spouting good things about the president, you are allowed to speak. If you are saying anything negative, you are not allowed to speak.
Is it your sense that official visitors, such as Administration figures, members of Congress, and the like, are shown what�s really happening in Iraq? Or are they shown a sanitized version of what�s happening?
It�s cleaned up before they get there. It�s really cleaned up before they get there. We are not going to take them on local runs in the local village.
Because?
Because they may end up dead. And you know how that would look back in the States, to have a member of Congress or a Senator killed in Iraq.
Campaign Begins as Bush Attacks Kerry in Speech
And so the serious distortion and mudslinging begins…
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/24/politics/campaign/24BUSH.html?th
American Idle National Tour 2004
A humorous spoof in Salon by Joyce McGreevy.
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/mcgreevy/2004/02/24/american_idle/index.html
On what does the White House base its optimism?
Do the math. Using the Fibbin’atcha Principle, add the 1.7 million projected new jobs for 2003 that never materialized, subtract 439,000 jobs lost that same year, then eliminate the year 2003. Multiply the 2004 projection that the average number of jobs will be 2.6 million higher than in 2003 by the number of people willing to believe anything if you say it often enough, then backpedal at a rate equal to the average velocity of two runaway trains heading in opposite directions, and cancel the 8 million unemployed. Factor in the 19th presidential visit to Florida since the 2000 ballot controversy (to the power of 5 Supreme Court justices minus 4), then after inverting the significance of 19,000 actual unemployed in Tampa, assign a greater value to the theoretical “40 more workers” that a factory owner in the same city hopes to add, and extrapolate the least likely outcome in the form of a speech that contains the words “strong” (x4), “upbeat"(x4), and “optimistic” (x7). Carry the one, carry the b.s., and do the hoky-poky as you turn yourself about. Simple, really…
Not Qualified, Not Truthful, Not Wise
...while George W. Bush may be a religiously sincere man who actually believes he’s trying to do good, he is, in the same incarnation, a make-believe president who has made a mess of almost everything and put the country at risk in many ways, including the risk of economic disorder.