(no subject)

Peter found the icon for me. Me loves Stewie. Especially his spoken word performance of Rocket Man. *grin*

She packed my bags
      last night,
pre-flight.

   Zero hour
nine AM.

And I'm gonna be...
                                     high
       as a kite
by then.


And I think it's gonna be a long,
          long,
                    time
'Til touchdown brings me 'round
again
to find
I'm not the man
they think I am
     at home
Ah, no
          no no...
I'm a rocket man...

Rocket man
Burnin' out his fuse Up here

alone

Bush blames US troops for his own screwups

Have you heard the latest Bush administration excuse for the missing 377 tons of HMX and RDX?

They say it's the fault of the troops.

Remember that just yesterday Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani, and RNC chairman Ed Gillespie (among others) were claiming that Kerry was denigrating the troops by (they claimed) suggesting the soldiers were derelict in their duty.

Kerry's actual statement, which my Dad and Grandpa heard him repeat in person in Rochester, MN yesterday, said: "George W. Bush who talks tough and brags about making America safer has once again failed to deliver. After being warned about the danger of major stockpiles of explosives in Iraq, this administration failed to guard those stockpiles – where nearly 380 tons of highly explosive weapons were kept. Today we learned that these explosives are missing, unaccounted for and could be in the hands of terrorists."

Kerry didn't blame the troops- he specifically blamed their commander in chief for not doing HIS duty.

So today, the whole attack changed: the Bush Administration and Campaign turned the blame on the troops.


Media Matters has a summary of the new developments, and has links to several articles with more details: Conservatives launch baseless verbal attacks on U.S. troops.

Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division who was commanding the unit in question, has also had a few things to say about the issue.

( Excerpt, since the New York Times requires a password )

But wait, there's more!

KSTP TV news right here in the Twin Cities had a crew embedded with one of the units stationed just south of al Qaqaa. On April 18, 2003, they were escorted through bunkers and filmed bunker after bunker of material labeled "explosives".

In one bunker, there were boxes marked with the name "Al Qaqaa", the munitions plant where tons of explosives allegedly went missing.

Once the doors to the bunkers were opened, they weren't secured. They were left open when the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew and the military went back to their base.

"We weren't quite sure what were looking at, but we saw so much of it and it didn't appear that this was being secured in any way," said photojournalist Joe Caffrey. "It was several miles away from where military people were staying in their tents".

Officers with the 101st Airborne told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS that the bunkers were within the U.S. military perimeter and protected. But Caffrey and former 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS Reporter Dean Staley, who spent three months together in Iraq, said Iraqis were coming and going freely.

"At one point there was a group of Iraqis driving around in a pick-up truck,"Staley said. "Three or four guys we kept an eye on, worried they might come near us."

A Psalm for a New Century

In an email from Mom this evening...

Psalm 2004

Bush is my shepherd, I shall be in want.
He maketh me to lie down on park benches,
He restoreth my doubts about the Republican Party.
He leadeth me into the paths of unemployment for his cronies' sake.
Yea, though no weapons of mass destruction have been found,
he maketh me continue to fear Evil.
His tax cuts for the rich and his deficit spending discomfort me.
He annointeth me with never-ending debt:
Verily my days of savings and assets are kaput.
Surely poverty and hard living shall follow me all the days of his administration
And my jobless child shall dwell in my basement forever.