If only it were true, Condoleezza (HamptonRoads.com/Pilot Online): "During her testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week, Condoleezza Rice was grilled about when U.S. troops can come home from Iraq.

The president%u2019s nominee for secretary of state, hewing closely to administration talking points, said America's 150,000 troops can return home when enough Iraqis are trained to take their place.

So how many Iraqis are ready for the job? No less a conservative authority than The Economist, the respected British magazine, put the number at 10,000 in a report this week. Other reports have put the number much lower.

Rice, who's supposed to know, pegged it closer to 120,000."

(Via Google News.)

In His Own Words: "There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit...

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken — the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment...

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: ‘This is not just.’

(Martin Luther King, April 4, 1967)

It really doesn’t matter what happens now. ... some began to ... talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. ... And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

(Martin Luther King, April 3, 1968)

King was assassinated the next morning, April 4, 1968."

(Via Aaron Swartz.)

The Nation | Blog | The Daily Outrage | Outrageous Outtakes | Ari Berman: "** Remember when Tom Ridge upped the terror alert in the run-up to war in Iraq? Then again after Abu Ghraib and the 9/11 Commission hearings in May? Then three days after the Democratic Convention for New York and New Jersey? And it stayed orange all the way through the election. Finally, with Bush safely re-elected, Ridge lowered the alert a week before the inaugural. "In retrospect," the Washington Post wrote, "[the alerts] were based largely on faulty intelligence, dated information or...an educated guess." Thanks for informing us now."

...

"** While DC pays, who parties? Corporations and their executives. According to a report by Public Citizen, corporate fat cats donated 96 percent of the $24.9 million raised as of Tuesday, with the finance and investment sectors leading the way at $6.3 million. In no way did Bush's plan to privatize Social Security influence their charity."

(Via The Nation Weblogs.)

Remember Russia?: "While it is good to continually point out that the Bush administration screwed the pooch on Iraq and neglected more serious threats from North Korea and Iran in the process, it is worthwhile to point out that there is precisely ONE entity that presents an existential threat to the United States: Russia. The solution for dealing with this existential threat? The Bush administration’s circus act/foreign policy team decided to write some talking points, call them the U.S.-Russian Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, and declare the problem solved. Now, the problems with SORT have been obvious for a while (no verification in the treaty, expires in 2012, is only in effect for one day, etc.). And Wade’s article points out that the negotiations for implementing the treaty aren’t going so well."

(Via ArmsControlWonk.com.)

The Nation | Blog | The Daily Outrage | What would MLK think? | Ari Berman: "pecifically, the Administration is targeting the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the agency primarily responsible for addressing the problems of urban and low-income people. According to the Washington Post, the White House wants to 'drastically shrink HUD's $8 billion community branch, purging dozens of economic development projects, scrapping a rural housing program and folding high-profile anti-poverty efforts into the Labor and Commerce departments.'

While housing values skyrocket and poverty increases, HUD may lose a quarter of its $31 billion budget. "

(Via The Nation Weblogs.)

Missile Defense Software: "MDA Director Henry ‘Trey’ Obering (right) attributes the failure of IFT-13C to a ‘very minor computer software glitch.’ Noah Shachtman, however, has posted a fantastic analysis from former DOD Director of Operational Test and Evaluation Phil Coyle who arrgues the software glitch is anything but minor."

(Via ArmsControlWonk.com.)

The Online Beat: "Speaking of what he called the 'essential work at home,' the President said he was determined to 'make our society more just and equal.' But how does he reconcile that pledge with the growing gap between rich and poor, assaults on affirmative action programs that allow victims of past discrimination to get an equal footing in society, and scheming to dismantle the safety-net protections of Social Security, Medicare and other programs?"

(Via The Nation Weblogs.)

GENERAL'S UP-ARMOR PLEA IGNORED: "For more than a year, Maj. Gen. William Webster, the head of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, had been asking his bosses for the money to toughen up his armored personnel carriers. And for more than a year, his requests went nowhere. Then, in December, Tennessee National Guard Spc. Thomas Wilson scorched Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for not armoring up American vehicles. Within days, Inside the Pentagon notes, Gen. Webster's long-ignored plea was finally answered. Webster’s request for additional armor for his M113 [personnel carriers] had languished at Army headquarters since October 2003, a month after he took command of the ‘3rd ID,’ as it is called... The requirement for up-armored M113s was just one of more than 50 ‘operational needs statements’ Webster submitted at the time... Initially, the 3rd ID flagged other requirements as more critical than the M113 up-armor effort, sources said. The division was requesting hundreds more radios, machine guns and trucks with the first priority being ‘to shoot, move and communicate’ when they returned to Iraq, said one Army insider."

(Via Defense Tech.)

Election result maps: "The (contiguous 48) states of the country are colored red or blue to indicate whether a majority of their voters voted for the Republican candidate (George W. Bush) or the Democratic candidate (John F. Kerry) respectively. The map gives the superficial impression that the 'red states' dominate the country, since they cover far more area than the blue ones. However, as pointed out by many others, this is misleading because it fails to take into account the fact that most of the red states have small populations, whereas most of the blue states have large ones. The blue may be small in area, but they are large in terms of numbers of people, which is what matters in an election.

We can correct for this by making use of a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states have been rescaled according to their population. That is, states are drawn with a size proportional not to their sheer topographic acreage -- which has little to do with politics -- but to the number of their inhabitants, states with more people appearing larger than states with fewer, regardless of their actual area on the ground."

(Via k5.)

Red States: Beneficiaries of Tax Revenue? || kuro5hin.org: "Having heard the blather or ranting about Red vs. Blue states for some time, I decided that I could check the curious general claim that 'Red states are beneficiaries of tax revenue'. Having obtained the data here about year-by-year comparisons of the states, I obtained some results for 2004. My intent is to identify trends without much partisan bias (BTW, I'm a Nader voter) in an American viewpoint that's not so much grey, but purple."

(Via k5.)

AlterNet: The Eve of Destruction: "Forcing a guy who knows he's dirty but knows his bosses are dirtier to sweat out a congressional hearing is a perfect way to test his loyalty. It's also a great way to test Congress's mettle %u2013 to probe just how atrophied the opposition party's willingness to oppose has become. What's more, once you've got them through the ordeal, you've stockpiled one more scapegoat to toss into the fire in case Congress ever gets hot on the trail of the higher-ups who issued the orders. And it establishes a record for a future defense: Once Congress has confirmed a Gonzales or a Chertoff, how can it then turn around and call the things done by a Gonzales or a Chertoff unlawful?"

(Via AlterNet.)

Operation Unified Assistance: "Operation Unified Assistance is the humanitarian operation effort in the wake of the Tsunami that struck South East Asia on 26 December 2004. Some 20 U.S. naval vessels are in the region and 85 U.S. military aircraft are working to deliver supplies to the survivors.

By Jan. 5, 2005 US servicemembers had delivered more than 610,000 pounds of relief supplies to the region. In the previous 24 hours, U.S. helicopters delivered 5,560 pounds of water, 142,940 pounds of food and 2,100 pounds of supplies.

Helicopters assigned to Carrier Air Wing Two (CVW-2) and Sailors from Abraham Lincoln conducted humanitarian operations in the wake of the Tsunami that struck South East Asia. The Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group is currently operating in the Indian Ocean off the waters of Indonesia and Thailand."

(Via GlobalSecurity.org.)

U.S. may be choosing Iran targets: "Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh reported today that the United States had been ''conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer'' to find nuclear, chemical and missile targets.

Hersh, who broke the story about the Abu Ghraib prisoner torture in Iraq, wrote that he had repeatedly been told by intelligence and military officials on condition of anonymity that ''the next strategic target was Iran.''"

(Via Chicago Sun-Times.)

Target Iran - Air Strikes: "One major uncertainty concerning the probability of disarming preventive strike against Iran's nuclear infrastructure is the question of American and Israeli assessments of their confidence in their assessments of the completeness of their understanding of Iran's nuclear infrastructure. It will be recalled that when the US contemplated striking China's nuclear infrastructure in mid-1964, prior to China's first nuclear test, their were doubts about the completeness of US intelligence. In fact, the US was surprised when China detonated a uranium bomb, since the US had overestimated the progress of China's plutonium program, and seriously underestimated the progress of China's uranium enrichment program. Iran's partners -- North Korea and Pakistan -- present contrasting studies in clandestine facilities. It appears that US intelligence has incomplete intelligence concerning some aspects of North Korea's plutonium program [mainly relating to whether there are undetected reprocessing facilities], and almost complete ignorance of the whereabouts of the DPRK's uranium program. The missing facilities are presumably at hidden underground locations. It is generally believed that Pakistan's major nuclear material production facilities are above ground and reasonably well characterized."

(Via GlobalSecurity.org.)

CNN.com - Bush hit for linking Iraq to vote - Jan 16, 2005: "In an interview with the Washington Post on Sunday, Bush was asked why no-one in his administration had been held accountable for perceived missteps on Iraq policy, including being wrong about weapons of mass destruction.

'We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election,' he was reported as saying."

(Via Google News.)

FAIR MEDIA ADVISORY: CBS 'Memogate' Fallout:: "In fact, the CBS review, headed by former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh (an appointee of Bush's father) and former Associated Press president Louis Boccardi, was not able to state conclusively whether the documents were forgeries or not. The report also found no evidence that political bias was a factor in the network's journalism. Instead, the report documented a series of misjudgments on the part of several CBS staffers, most notably producer Mary Mapes.

CBS's investigation did document serious failures in 60 Minutes' efforts to check its source's claims--an endemic problem in commercial news. If 'Memogate' had called attention to the general issue of credulous journalism, it would have performed a valuable service for the public. But the media discussion of the incident generally treated it as either an aberration or as an emblem of left-wing media bias."

(Via Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.)