"There's been some progress. There's
been some horrific bombings, of course, but
there's also a decline in sectarian violence,"
Bush said as he met in the Oval Office with the
US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus.
....
He spoke as a string of bomb attacks
in Iraq on Monday killed more than 20 people and
wounded dozens of others, one day after
insurgents killed 50 people and one week after a
series of blasts killed about 200 people.
Even the AFP (The Agence
France-Presse) had to put a bit of the truth
in the final paragraph. Why was this not the
lead?
WASHINGTON - U.S. officials who say
there has been a dramatic drop in sectarian
violence in Iraq since President Bush began
sending more American troops into Baghdad aren't
counting one of the main killers of Iraqi
civilians.
Car bombs and other explosive devices have
killed thousands of Iraqis in the past three
years, but the administration doesn't include
them in the casualty counts it has been citing as
evidence that the surge of additional U.S. forces
is beginning to defuse tensions between Shiite
and Sunni Muslims.
President Bush explained why in a television
interview on Tuesday. "If the standard of success
is no car bombings or suicide bombings, we have
just handed those who commit suicide bombings a
huge victory," he told TV interviewer Charlie
Rose.
Others, however, say that not counting
bombing victims skews the evidence of how well
the Baghdad security plan is protecting the
civilian population - one of the surge's main
goals.
"Since the administration keeps saying that
failure is not an option, they are redefining
success in a way that suits them," said James
Denselow, an Iraq specialist at London-based
Chatham House, a foreign policy think
tank.
Let us use the Bush Doctrine of Selective
Information to reach a different conclusion:
Nearly 100% of US citizens want the US out of
Iraq now, if you don't count all the
people who get their information from Fox, Rush
or Drudge.
Iraqi
insurgency: Cheney vs.
Reality
So let's not call it "sectarian violence", and
let's avoid such loaded terms as "civil war" and
"miserable failure". Let's pretend that only a
few Iraqis don't want us in their country so the
people killing our brave soldiers and each other
are simply part of an "Iraqi Insurgency".
Vice-President Dick Cheney is famous for
being so utterly wrong about the Iraqi Insurgency
being in the "last
throes" in 2005 and still celebrates the "enormous
success" of the Iraqi Occupation in 2007. In
reality, the exact opposite is true on
both counts: The insurgency is stronger now than
ever, and the Iraqi War has been a worse quagmire
than Vietnam. In other words, the liberals were
right and the conservatives were wrong.
Again.
Juan Cole, President of the Global Americana
Institute, got it right. Informed
Comment, April 28, 2007 (links his, emphasis
mine):
Condi Rice wanted to delay the news, but
it has broken on two fronts.
Warren
Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay of McClatchy
report that the annual State Department on
terrorism will report a nearly 30% rise over the
previous year, most of it accounted for by
attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In other words Cheney has it exactly
backwards. The US military presence in Iraq
and Afghanistan is feeding terrorism, not
preventing or lessening it. "They" won't follow
us home if we leave. But they might if we
don't.
As if to put an exclamation point on the
State Department report, the Saudis were
constrained to
arrest some 172 persons involved in al-Qaeda
terror cells in the Kingdom, who were
planning to hijack planes and fly them into the
Saudi oil fields. If they targeted the oil
facilities cleverly, the terrorists could have
taken 10% of the world petroleum supply off the
market, at least for a while.
The left is oddly silent in one area.
Whenever the Israelis hit a military target
anywhere near a mosque or an Islamic shrine, the
outcry from the liberals was deafening. But when
Muslims attack holy shrines of another Muslim
sect, the left merely continues to go after
Bush.
KARBALA, Iraq (AFP) - A suicide car
bomber detonated his payload on a crowded street
near a revered Shiite shrine in the Iraqi city of
Karbala on Saturday, killing at least 55 people
and wounding nearly 160 others.
"Many of the wounded are women and children," said Salim Kadhim,
spokesman for the Karbala health department.
"Many of them are in a serious condition, so the
number of dead is likely to rise."
A senior police officer, speaking on
condition of anonymity, confirmed the attack had
been carried out by a suicide bomber, the deadly
hallmark of Iraq's Sunni insurgency.
The blast erupted 200 metres (yards) from the
shrine of Imam Abbas, the second holiest in
Karbala, at 7:10 pm (1510 GMT) when Al-Abbas
street was crowded with passers-by, local
officials said.
ASHINGTON - A State Department report on
terrorism due out next week will show a nearly 30
percent increase in terrorist attacks worldwide
in 2006 to more than 14,000, almost all of the
boost due to growing violence in Iraq and
Afghanistan, U.S. officials said Friday.
The annual report's release comes amid a
bitter feud between the White House and Congress
over funding for U.S. troops in Iraq and a
deadline favored by Democrats to begin a U.S.
troop withdrawal.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her
top aides earlier this week had considered
postponing or downplaying the release of this
year's edition of the terrorism report, officials
in several agencies and on Capitol Hill said.
Ultimately, they decided to issue the report
on or near the congressionally mandated deadline
of Monday, the officials said.
"We're proceeding in normal fashion with the
final review of this and expect it to be released
early next week," State Department deputy
spokesman Tom Casey said.
A half-dozen U.S. officials with knowledge of
the report's contents or the debate surrounding
it agreed to discuss those topics on the
condition they not be identified because of the
extreme political sensitivities surrounding the
war and the report.
Based on data compiled by the U.S.
intelligence community's National
Counterterrorism Center, the report says there
were 14,338 terrorist attacks last year, up 29
percent from 11,111 attacks in 2005.
Forty-five percent of the attacks were in Iraq.
....
Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA officer who
also worked in counterterrorism at the State
Department, said that while the new report would
show major increases in attacks last year in Iraq
and Afghanistan, it could chart reductions in
mass casualty attacks in the rest of the
world.
"The good news is ... we're seeing verifiable
and drastic reductions," he said.
Bush's first impulse is always to run away,
and his second impulse is always to lie about it.
Here we see both in play from the Loyal Bushies.
When a report comes out that completely
discredits the Bush administrations response to
9/11, Condoleezza Rice, the former National
Security Advisor and now Secretary of State,
tries to sweep it under the table. When the
reality of the situation is that terrorism is on
the rise, worldwide, a CIA officer simply lies
about it. This is not "spin control": People
are dying because of the moral failing of the
sphincter conservatives.
Homegrown amateur¬Ýterror groups such as
the Fort Dix Six have supplanted Al Qaeda to pose
the most immediate security threat to the U.S.,
FBI Director Robert Mueller said yesterday.
While his greatest long-term fear was Al
Qaeda acquiring a weapon of mass destruction,
Mueller said locals bent on the "path to
radicalization" and wielding conventional arms
and explosives were the main focus for now.
"For some time now, we've been concerned
about the growth of homegrown groups," Mueller
said at a breakfast with reporters.
Mueller said 9/11 was an inspiration to
terrorists worldwide and he expected they would
act again within U.S. borders.
"I do not think for a moment that there are
not people out there who want to replicate that,"
Mueller said. "We can anticipate it. There's no
doubt in my mind that Al Qaeda is planning
against the U.S."
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly agreed,
stating the case "underscores the concern that we
have had for quite sometime about this so-called
homegrown terrorist phenomena."
"We don't know how many other groups such as
this might be forming," he said in New
York.
The plot was discovered through old-fashioned
police work. No torture was necessary, and we
didn't have to rip up the Constitution to keep us
safe. The exact opposite of the
techniques which have failed at Abu Ghraib and
Guantanamo Bay succeeded in stopping a terrorist
attack on US soil.
Meteor Blades over at DailyKos has
a good analysis: Fort
Dix Six and the Law. The Clinton approach
was sneered at by the Bush administration, but
the exact opposite is the case: The
Clinton Administration was far superior to the
Bush Administration when responding to terrorism
and threats of terrorism.
A few final thoughts
Isolationism failed in the 30s, now a New
Isolationism is packaged as "we fight them there
so we don't have to fight them here." Idiots.
Since it was established shortly after 9/11,
the number of days the Department
of Homeland Security has had the National
Threat Advisory threat level at Blue or Green
(the lowest levels): Zero. So much for being
"safe at home".
So... what ever happened to the anthrax
terrorists? Is anyone still looking for them?
Or did they happen to find that they were friends
of (or at least fellow travelers with) John
Ashcroft and the religious right? It's been
nearly six years. A few answers should be
forthcoming.
Not that we'd believe anything a Loyal Bushie had to say...
Open Letter from Michael Moore to U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson
Over the last seven years of the Bush Presidency, we have seen the abuse of government to promote a political agenda designed to benefit the conservative base of the Republican Party, special interests and major financial contributors.
John Beer: Dotty-Mouthed: Post-porn performer Annie Sprinkle returns after eight years (villagevoice.com)
The real political lessons of Exposed lie deeper, in the loving solidarity, for instance, that leads Stephens to shave her own head during Sprinkle's chemotherapy, documented in a set of striking photographs ("cancer erotica," they half-jokingly call them). Sprinkle and Stephens take dippy California mysticism and dime-store audience-participation tricks (Exquisite Corpses?) and somehow transmute them into hope. The world's a little closer to utopia with them in it.
Douglas Messerli: The ordinary obsessions of ordinary lives (nthposition.com)
[Warning: Spoilers!] In nearly all of the films written by Mike White, oddball characters gradually move from their obsessions to a recognition of their place in life, temporarily losing touch with reality only to later reintegrate themselves into the society at large.
Nell Minow: The Mentor (beliefnet.com)
In 'Akeelah and the Bee,' Laurence Fishburne once again plays a memorable role model, this time coaching a gifted young girl.
Paul Florez: Tori Amos-unplugged (advocate.com)
At the launch party of American Doll Posse at New York City's Spotlight Live venue, Tori Amos talks to us about the new album-and the "Popcorn Man."
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Dip Tinking about H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N (jewishworldreview.com)
... I found [my young son] engrossed in an old book that had somehow survived many years and several interstate moves intact. Four decades earlier, it had made me laugh out loud and, amazingly, it was having precisely the same effect on my son. More amazing still, the book was already decades old when I had read it as a boy. The tome was "The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N," penned in the 1930s by Leo Rosten (under the nom de plume Leonard Q. Ross) for The New Yorker and then published as a book (followed by a sequel, "The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N" ).
CBS opens the night with the SEASON FINALE'How I Met Your Mother', followed by a FRESH'2½ Men', then the SERIES FINALE'King Of Queens', followed by a FRESH'CSI: The 2nd One'.
Scheduled on a FRESHDave are Mike Myers and America Ferrara.
Scheduled on a FRESHCraig are Carrot Top and Miranda Lambert.
NBC begins the night with a FRESH'Deal Or No Deal', followed by a FRESH'Heroes', then a FRESH'Law & Order: Criminal Intent'.
Scheduled on a FRESHLeno are Dominic Monaghan, Taylor Hicks, "American Idol" finalists Jordin Sparks, Melinda Doolittle, and Blake Lewis.
Scheduled on a FRESHConan are William Shatner, Eric Dane, and mtvU's Best Music on Campus Winner.
On a RERUNCarson Daly (from 4/12/07) are Quentin Tarantino and Rock Kills Kid.
ABC starts the night with a FRESH 90-minute 'Dancing With The Stars', followed by a FRESH'The Bachelor'.
Scheduled on a FRESHJimmy Kimmel (from 4/19/07) are Luke Wilson, Andy Baldwin, and Bucky Covington.
The CW offers the SEASON FINALE'Everybody Hates Chris', followed by a FRESH'All Of Us', then a FRESH hourlong 'The Game'.
Faux has a RERUN'House', followed by a FRESH'24'.
MY has a FRESH'IFL Battleground'.
A&E has 'CSI: The 2nd One', another 'CSI: The 2nd One', 'The Sopranos', and more 'The Sopranos'.
AMC offers the movie 'Daddy And Them', followed by the movie 'An Affair To Remember', then the movie 'An Affair To Remember', again.
BBC -
[12:00 PM] Gordon Ramsay's F Word - Episode 5;
[1:00 PM] What Not To Wear - Ep. 1 Sandie;
[1:30 PM] What Not To Wear - Ep. 2 Lucy;
[2:00 PM] The Weakest Link - Episode 45;
[3:00 PM] How Clean Is Your House? - Episode 4;
[3:30 PM] How Clean Is Your House? - Episode 5;
[4:00 PM] Changing Rooms - Ep. 1 Conisbrough;
[4:30 PM] Changing Rooms - Ep. 2 Heybridge;
[5:00 PM] Footballers Wive$ - Episode 3;
[6:00 PM] The Weakest Link - Episode 46;
[7:00 PM] BBC World News - BBC World News;
[7:30 PM] How Clean Is Your House? - Episode 3;
[8:00 PM] Waking the Dead - Episode 4;
[10:00 PM] Footballers Wive$ - Episode 4;
[11:00 PM] Waking the Dead - Episode 4;
[1:00 AM] Footballers Wive$ - Episode 4;
[2:00 AM] The Weakest Link - Episode 45;
[3:00 AM] The Ice - Episode 1;
[4:30 AM] The ice - Episode 2;
[6:00 AM] BBC World News - BBC World News. (ALL TIMES EDT)
Bravo has 'Most Outrageous Moments', another 'Most Outrageous Moments', 'Inside The Actors Studio', and 'Top Chef'.
Comedy Central has 'Scrubs', another 'Scrubs', an old 'Jon Stewart', an old 'Colbert Report', 'Reno 911!', 'South Park', 'Scrubs', and antoher 'Scrubs'.
Scheduled on a FRESHJon Stewart is Jeremy Paxman.
Scheduled on a FRESHColbert Report is William Langewiesche.
FX has the movie 'Sideways', followed by the movie 'Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story', then a FRESH'The Riches'.
History has 'Modern Marvels', 'UFO Files', 'Cities Of The Underworld', and 'Digging For The Truth'.
IFC -
[06:35 AM] SXSW: Behind The Badge; ;
[07:05 AM] Garage Days;
[08:55 AM] Frazetta: Painting with Fire;
[10:30 AM] Beyond Rangoon;
[12:15 PM] Heaven;
[01:55 PM] Garage Days;
[03:45 PM] Frazetta: Painting with Fire;
[05:20 PM] Beyond Rangoon;
[07:05 PM] A Slipping-Down Life;
[09:00 PM] Marci X;
[10:30 PM] How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It);
[12:00 AM] A Decade Under The Influence: Part 1;
[01:00 AM] Marci X;
[02:30 AM] How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It);
[04:00 AM] Jesus' Son;
[05:50 AM] Garage Days. (ALL TIMES EDT)
Sundance -
[05:00 AM] The Day of the Jackal;
[08:00 AM] The Galindez File;
[10:00 AM] Boom!;
[12:00 PM] Shakespeare Behind Bars;
[01:00 PM] The Year of the Yao;
[03:00 PM] Arna's Children;
[04:00 PM] Dust to Dust: The Health Effects of 9/11;
[05:00 PM] Shakespeare Behind Bars;
[07:00 PM] Episode 4;
[08:00 PM] (Episode 2);
[09:00 PM] House;
[10:00 PM] The Year of the Yao;
[11:00 PM] Dust to Dust: The Health Effects of 9/11;
[12:00 AM] Ghost Story;
[02:00 AM] The Hero;
[04:00 AM] A Tale of Two Sisters. (ALL TIMES EDT)
Sisters Nancy (L) and Ann Wilson of the band Heart perform during the second annual VH1 Rock Honors concert at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas, Nevada May 12, 2007.
Photo by Steve Marcus
Imagine a "dream machine" on wheels. It's easy if you try. But the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus is no dream. A state-of-the-art multimedia studio packed in a bus, it's a vehicle for opening the minds of aspiring young musicians.
"Swing open the door, step inside, take three short steps into the main cabin and look around," writes Mark Garvey in "Come Together: The Official John Lennon Educational Tour Bus Guide to Music and Video," a recently published history of the bus by Garvey and Yoko Ono Lennon. "You've entered a different world. And whether you're young or old, if you're a person who harbors music, video-editing or any related technical aspirations, you know you've just walked into a candy shop."
Garvey captures the essence of the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus, which has been exposing young people to opportunities within the recording industry for the past 10 years. The bus operates year-round to offer students across the country an education in songwriting, audio and video recording, and the music business. It includes a 45-foot-long recording and multimedia studio as well as a 16-foot-long trailer carrying instruments and ancillary equipment.
Race driver Danica Patrick, right, talks with actress Ashley Judd as they sit on a cart in the pit area on the second day of qualifications for the Indy 500 auto race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Indianapolis, Sunday, May 13, 2007.
Photo by Darron Cummings
The Dalai Lama will keep his spiritual role but wants to lessen his political burden as he moves into "retirement," an official in the Tibetan spiritual leader's office said.
The remarks by the official came after the 71-year-old exiled spiritual head told students in the United States that he would "retire completely" within a few years and was already "semi-retired."
"The political leadership will be transferred over a period of time but he will continue to be the spiritual leader because as the Dalai Lama, the issue of relinquishing the post does not arise," Chhime Rigzing, a senior spokesman for the Tibetan leader, said on Saturday.
A man who as a child was cared for by 1920s Paris pin-up queen Josephine Baker has claimed a moral victory after forcing the US postal service to accept postcards featuring the bare-breasted "Black Venus."
The trouble started last year when Jean-Claude Baker, a New York restaurateur who Josephine apparently described as the 13th of her 12 adopted children, decided to mail out 15,000 postcards promoting his business.
"I found this very pretty picture, it was very sweet," Jean-Claude told AFP, explaining how before printing the postcards, a friend suggested he clear the watercolor with the US postal service.
"When I went there, the teller said 'This is not at all acceptable. This is pornographic advertising!' The other tellers and people started to gather around. It was humiliating," Jean-Claude said.
Pirates Of The Caribbean star Johnny Depp has described working with Rolling Stones legend Keith Richards as "perfect".
The actor, who teams up with the guitarist in the third instalment of the series At World's End, heaped praised on the Rolling Stones hellraiser for being a professional star.
He said: "Keith did his bit like it was any other gig, he did it perfectly, it wasn't like, you know people could tell that it was his first cinematic venture, he was just perfect.
In this photo provided by Princess Cruises, from left to right, Susan Olsen (aka Cindy Brady) and Florence Henderson (aka Carol Brady) of The Brady Bunch, Marion Ross (aka Marion Cunninghman) and Erin Moran (aka Joanie Cunningham) of Happy Days break the ceremonial champagne bottle at the naming ceremony of Emerald Princess at the main port of Piraues, near Athens early Sunday, May 13, 2007. These iconic TV mothers and daughters were on hand to be honored as godmothers of the 113,000 Emerald Princess as part of a historic Mother's Day celebration ship naming ceremony.
Photo by Thanassis Stavrakis
Artist Oli Goldsmith wants to make it perfectly clear - his mission to create 999 Borat portraits is not the work of a deranged Sacha Baron Cohen fan.
"It could have been anybody, I guess," Goldsmith, 27, says from his west-end Toronto studio where he has finished approximately 250 original works featuring Borat.
The Toronto-born artist adds that he didn't even particularly like last year's hit film, "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan."
Goldsmith has certainly made Borat seem like the perfect artist's muse in the portraits he's completed so far (available for viewing at www.999borats.com.)
Brooke Shields says postpartum depression is more prevalent than anyone wants to admit, and that it's time for lawmakers to pass legislation to help new mothers.
"There is an entire population of women suffering," the actress told George Stephanopoulos in an interview broadcast Sunday on ABC's "This Week."
She told Stephanopoulos that she experienced acute postpartum depression after the birth of her first daughter, and it was devastating to her family.
An undated handout photo of a gorgeted puffleg, a new species of hummingbird. The new blue-and-green throated hummingbird species has been discovered in a cloud forest in Colombia, and already needs protection from human encroachment, the experts who found the bird said on May 13, 2007. Called the gorgeted puffleg, the new species is easily twice as big as the thumb-sized hummingbirds found in the eastern United States, measuring between 3.5 and 4 inches (95 and 100 mm) in length, its discoverers said.
Photo by Alex Cortes
NBC Universal and producer Dick Wolf struck a last-minute deal Sunday to keep "Law & Order" and its two spinoffs on the air, although "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" episodes will first be seen on the USA cable network.
The deal ensures an 18th season of "Law & Order" on NBC. That's second only to "Gunsmoke," which aired from 1955 to 1975 and was the longest-running network drama series on TV.
NBC had essentially concluded it had room for only two of Wolf's series on next year's schedule. "Law & Order: SVU" has the highest ratings of the three, so that was safe. After some brief conversations about shifting "Law & Order" to Time Warner Inc.'s TNT, the decision was made to keep "Criminal Intent" for USA, said Jeff Zucker, chairman of NBC Universal.
A film celebrating Japan's wartime "kamikaze" suicide pilots and written by Tokyo's nationalist governor opened in theatres on Saturday, sparking more of a pacifist than a patriotic response from audiences.
"For Those We Love," written by Shintaro Ishihara, a 74-year-old writer-turned-politician, tells the true story of a restaurant owner who became a mother figure to many of the young men as they trained to crash explosives-laden aircraft into U.S. warships.
Though Ishihara is known for patriotic policies, including introducing compulsory singing of the national anthem in schools, members of the audience took away a different message from the lavish 1.8 billion yen production.
"It made me think we should never go to war. War is terrible and all it leaves behind is bitterness," said a 58-year-old businessman, who gave his name only as Hiro, after watching the film in a central Tokyo theatre.
A model demonstrates the use of Umo Inc.'s 24-carat gold leaf 'Gold Facial Treatment' at the Beautyworld Japan 2007 trade fair in Tokyo May 7, 2007. The treatment costs 30, 000 yen ($250).
Photo by Toru Hanai
If fan sentiment had anything to do with it, singer and humorist Mel Tillis surely would have become a member of the Grand Ole Opry long ago.
The 74-year-old performer finally got his invitation during an appearance on the Opry stage Saturday, when friend and fellow singer "Whisperin" Bill Anderson asked him to become the show's newest member.
Tillis, who turned his stutter into his trademark, received a standing ovation as his daughter, fellow singer and Opry member Pam Tillis, and son Mel Jr. joined him on stage.
You have reached the Home page of BartCop Entertainment.
Make yourself home, take your shoes off...
Go ahead, scratch it if it itches.
The idea is to have fun.
Do you have something to say?
Anything that increased your blood pressure, or, even better,
amused or entertained?
Do you have a great album no one's heard?
How about a favorite TV show, movie, book, play, cartoon, or legal amusement?
A popular artist that just plain pisses you off?
A box set the whole world should own?
Vile, filthy rumors about Republican musicians?
Just plain vile, filthy rumors?
This is your place.
