Month: October 2005

“President George W. Bush and Bono discuss global AIDS and Africa policy in the Oval Office Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2005, following lunch in the White House. White House photo by Eric Draper”

White House photo. (Is the portrait behind them crooked?)

Scottie hasn’t announced his daily press briefing yet. C-SPAN has nothing scheduled either.

P.S. C-SPAN has all of Harriet Miers’ submitted questionnaires. (Check the middle column, under Featured Links.)

OPEN THREAD!

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Okay – these are not mine but great ideas….from a Pagan site that I spend lots of time on! Here’s to a witchy sense of humor!

Witches Hat Cookies

32 Kisses milk chocolates, unwrapped
1 package (11 1/2 ounces) fudge-striped shortbread cookies (32)
1 tube (4.25 ounces) orange or red icing

1. Attach 1 milk choclate Kiss to bottom of each chocolate cookie bottom, using icing.

2. Pipe icing around base of chocolate candy.

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by Patrick Lang

I wrote the post quoted below the fold on 26 August. At that time there had begun to be talk around Washington in neocon circles of reviving the 20th Century French inspired counterinsurgency doctrine known as the “Oil Spot Method.”

Col. Patrick W. Lang (Ret.), a highly decorated retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces, served as “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism” for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and was later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. Col. Lang was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point. For his service in the DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” He is a frequent commentator on television and radio, including PBS’s Newshour, and most recently on MSNBC’s Hardball and NPR’s “All Things Considered.” His CV and blog are linked below the fold.

This method, worked out in the “school of hard knocks” in Indochina and Algeria essentially holds that it is control of the population that is the right goal in a revolutionary war situation and that combat operations are merely a “means” to that “end.”

In pursuit of that goal the development of the civil communities in the country and their self-perceived welfare has first priority. This is not to say that police and combat action will be especially benign during his process. In extremis, the theory would hold that negative methods of control will suffice if positive ones are not possible. The awfulness of what happened in the Casbah of Algiers in the mid-50s is an example.

We attempted to apply that doctrine in the 20th Century with success in some places and failure in others. Vietnam was the most spectacular failure at the national level.

Continued BELOW — “David Brooks on Vietnam and Iraq”:

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Crossposted at dailykos.

I was looking for information on the WHIG wunderkind <s>Jimmy Olsen</s&gt Jim Wilkinson, and I came across this article from September of 2002 on a website called theexperiment.org.

Unless this is an administration plant (not beyond the realm of possibility) this article appears to describe the genesis of WHIG.

Please see below for a sample of the article and a list of the creepy creatures originally involved:

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Workers, however, will receive an average base salary increase of just 3.6 percent next year, according to Hewitt Associates’ 29th annual survey of more than 1,000 organizations. That’s the same that workers received nationwide this year.

Employees are expected to spend an average of $3,136 next year in premiums, deductibles and co-pays, a 12 percent increase from this year, according to Hewitt.

“So that means our entire raise — plus a little extra — is going to pay for those higher health care costs,” said Ken Abosch, business leader in the talent consulting group for the Lincolnshire, Ill.-based firm. “Plus, we’re paying more for energy.”

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