S: I love this:
“But then, Dowd is part of our dumbest professional cohort—she’s one of our millionaire pundits. She’s vastly overpaid and over-praised—and she’s dumb as a bunch of old rocks.” (Daily Howler)
M: More important than that though, we’ve got some problems with this military of ours. It’s a very sad thing, how people who enlist are sometimes forced to replace rodents and chimpanzees for stuff like this:
The Pentagon resumed its controversial mandatory anthrax vaccinations program for selected troops last week despite the fact that its own doctors are quietly conducting research into adverse effects of the vaccine, a RAW STORY investigation has found. In the May 2006 report, the GAO said the “vaccine has not been adequately tested on humans; no studies have been done to determine the optimum number of doses; the long-term safety has not been studied and data on short-term reactions are limited.”Dr. Waytes (manufacturer’s spokesperson) asserted that the majority of soldiers’ claims that the vaccine causes autoimmune disorders and serious illnesses are “in people’s minds.”
Dr. Nass (an ethical doctor) disagrees. “We really don’t know about long-term safety,” Nass said, noting that the majority of studies are focused on short-term effects. “The data just doesn’t exist.”
I: Juking the stats, suddenly Bush’s people aren’t counting car bombings in Iraq as part of the death toll…so they did achieve some progress, in a ‘using a cheat code on a video game’ sort of way:
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. (McClatchy)
So does this mean that by committing suicide, you can still be a winner? Or is he setting the stage for the next move, to stop counting our own dead and wounded?
O: Anyways…at least you can always count on Omar having a plan: