… the generals on the ground are in charge.” Video at Americablog.
“NATO has insufficient troops in Afghanistan
to secure a victory over Taliban fighters in the coming months,” NATO’s top commander, British Gen. David Richards, has told the Financial Times.
Kerry issues written apology.
Just released:
As a combat veteran, I want to make it clear to anyone in uniform and to their loved ones: my poorly stated joke at a rally was not about, and never intended to refer to any troop.
I sincerely regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform, and I personally apologize to any service member, family member, or American who was offended.
It is clear the Republican Party would rather talk about anything but their failed security policy. I don’t want my verbal slip to be a diversion from the real issues. I will continue to fight for a change of course to provide real security for our country, and a winning strategy for our troops.
Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld together 4ever.
“President Bush said Wednesday he wants Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney to remain in his administration until the end of his presidency, extending a job guarantee to two of the most-criticized members of his team.”
Basketblogging: Now Elsewhere
This season I’m going to be writing about the Wizards for DCist in an effort to prevent this site from becoming unduly hoops-centric. My first item is up today in anticipation of the season opener tonight in Cleveland. I’m a ‘Zards-optimist relative to the CW (see also, I’m a Wizards fan) though not as much of an optimist as Bill Simmons who, I think, is overestimating both DC and New Jersey (incidentally, these squads get compared a lot because they’re both led by a “big three” on the perimeter, but they’re very different — last year NJ was slow, defensively brilliant, and offensively inept; Washington was more-or-less the opposite).
Nicholas Kristof gets Acidic about Climate
While most pundits are focusing on the campaign, New York Times columnist Kristof has taken the time to write a thoughtful op-ed (subs. req’d) on a story that will be with us long, long after congressional pages or macaca or botched jokes about Iraq.
He deserves special credit for devoting considerable ink to an area that has not gotten sufficient attention in the media (although it has been well-studied in the scientific community): ocean acidification:
If you think of the earth’s surface as a great beaker, then it’s filled mostly with ocean water. It is slightly alkaline, and that’s what creates a hospitable home for fish, coral reefs and plankton — and indirectly, higher up the food chain, for us.
But scientists have discovered that the carbon dioxide we’re spewing into the air doesn’t just heat up the atmosphere and lead to rising seas. Much of that carbon is absorbed by the oceans, and there it produces carbonic acid — the same stuff found in soda pop.
That makes oceans a bit more acidic, impairing the ability of certain shellfish to produce shells, which, like coral reefs, are made of calcium carbonate. A recent article in Scientific American explained the indignity of being a dissolving mollusk in an acidic ocean: “Drop a piece of chalk (calcium carbonate) into a glass of vinegar (a mild acid) if you need a demonstration of the general worry: the chalk will begin dissolving immediately.”
The more acidic waters may spell the end, at least in higher latitudes, of some of the tiniest variations of shellfish — certain plankton and tiny snails called pteropods. This would disrupt the food chain, possibly killing off many whales and fish, and rippling up all the way to humans.
We stand, so to speak, on the shoulders of plankton.
VIDEO: Snow Incessantly Calls On Kerry To Apologize, Ignoring Kerry Apology
ThinkProgress, the AP, and Reuters have all reported that Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) apologized for his remarks on MSNBC this morning. Specifically Kerry said, “I’m sorry” and called his remarks “pretty stupid.”
Nevertheless, during the White House press conference today, Tony Snow repeatedly called on Kerry to apologize. Watch it:
[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2006/11/snowsorryfinal.320.240.flv]
Full transcript below: Read more
Women can’t say no after sex has started,
according to a ruling on a rape law by a Maryland court.
“Operation Comeback”
Joshua Muravchik writes in Foreign Policy about how to save neoconservatism. The main priorities will be surprising — it involves a lot of lying, and a lot of smearing of one’s enemies. For example, “‘Neocon’ is now widely synonymous with ‘ultraconservative’ or, for some, ‘dirty Jew.’” Yes, it’s true. Neocon is in disrepute not because neoconservative ideas make very little sense and the policies they’ve advocated have proven disastrous — it’s because we hate the Jews. Similarly, here’s step one:
Learn from Our Mistakes. We are guilty of poorly explaining neoconservatism. How, for example, did the canard spread that the roots of neoconservative foreign policy can be traced back to Leo Strauss and Leon Trotsky? The first of these false connections was cooked up by Lyndon LaRouche, the same convicted scam artist who spends his days alerting humanity to the Zionist-Henry Kissinger-Queen Elizabeth conspiracy. The second probably originated with insufficiently reconstructed Stalinists.
What crazy canards! This here is the Amazon page for Irving Kristol’s 1995 book, Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. John J. Miller writes that in the book, “Kristol sketches his intellectual growth, which began while he was a young man attending neo-Trotskyite meetings in Brooklyn (where he met his wife, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb) and eventually took him to Washington, D.C., where today he is a fixture at right-of-center political gatherings.” Canard! Publisher’s Weekly writes, “Particularly interesting is his previously unpublished opening memoir concerning influences such as Lionel Trilling, Leo Strauss and army life as well as the founding of his magazine and his work with the American Enterprise Institute to extend conservatism beyond free enterprise to reflect “on the roots of social and cultural stability.” Canard!
In his essay “A Man Without Footnotes” included in The Neoconservative Imagination: Essays in Honor of Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer recounts that “Irving Kristol at one point wrote that the two chief influences on his thinking were Lionel Trilling and Leo Strauss.” Canard!
Why is Foreign Policy publishing this crap?
Boehner promises to ‘beat John Kerry to death’
if he doesn’t apologize for his comments on Iraq. Watch it:
[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2006/11/boehnerbeat.320.240.flv]
Note to Boehner: Kerry apologized this morning on MSNBC.
