someone's preznit: "God is bigger than humans"

* Patrick Coburn:

"Sunni insurgents have cut the roads linking the city to the rest of Iraq. The country is being partitioned as militiamen fight bloody battles for control of towns and villages north and south of the capital.

As American and British political leaders argue over responsibility for the crisis in Iraq, the country has taken another lurch towards disintegration.

Well-armed Sunni tribes now largely surround Baghdad and are fighting Shia militias to complete the encirclement.

The Sunni insurgents seem to be following a plan to control all the approaches to Baghdad. They have long held the highway leading west to the Jordanian border and east into Diyala province. Now they seem to be systematically taking over routes leading north and south.
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The scale of killing is already as bad as Bosnia at the height of the Balkans conflict. An apocalyptic scenario could well emerge - with slaughter on a massive scale. As America prepares its exit strategy, the fear in Iraq is of a genocidal conflict between the Sunni minority and the Shias in which an entire society implodes."

egads. it gets worse.

* arkin:

"Somehow while we weren't looking, the defense budget bloated to a half a trillion annually.

Congress just administers the madness, adding on this and that in a behind the scenes ritual: pork mongers and Cunningham's on the take, Democrats trying to prove their martial spirit by arguing for even more, junior secretaries of both parties offering brilliant amendments to show that they care about the troops even more.

Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has hit upon a perfect device for both public control and executive autonomy. He has turned crisis into a permanent state of excess. "Emergency" funding has now become the regular state of affairs. We have, in fact, two defense budgets, a regular budget that receives some scrutiny and is somewhat limited, and an emergency supplemental that grows ever larger without much outside oversight.

The budget situation doesn't threaten to bankrupt America. And people seem only too happy to pay to keep the military over there, cowed in an endless post September 11 offering. Congress would hardly remark upon the deception were it not for the assault on their power. And in that the tale of two budgets may be coming to an end."

* someone's preznit speaks:

""It's an amazing country, you know? When you've got total strangers praying for a guy like me. It really is. I think it makes us very unique as a nation, and I embrace it.""

whatafuckingmaroon.

* froomkin:

"Hannity asked Bush if he felt being president was his God-given destiny, and Bush demurred. "You know, I don't know. There's just an interesting argument. I think mankind has to be very comfortable about ascribing to God, you know, kind of human answers. In other words, God is bigger than humans.""