It’s about damn time.

The case could begin to fulfill a longtime goal of the Bush administration: establishing culpability for the terrorist attacks of 2001. [...]

Military prosecutors are in the final phases of preparing the first sweeping case against suspected conspirators in the plot that led to the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, people who have been briefed on the case said.

The charges, to be filed in the military commission system at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, would involve as many as six prisoners, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the former senior aide to Osama bin Laden who has said he was the principal planner of the plot.

GWB is crossing his fingers to add something positive to his Presidency (besides his futile efforts at Middle Eastern peace).

But several of the detainees being prosecuted for their parts in the Sept. 11th attack were tortured with waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and even “forced to wear a bra and led around on a leash”.

Something tells me it won’t be a swift trial.

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From MSNBC-

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are scheduled to participate in an MSNBC debate Feb. 26 from Ohio, which holds its primary March 4. The Clinton campaign has pushed hard for as many debates as possible with Obama, but Wolfson said the Feb. 26 debate could be jeopardized.

Wolfson pointed to what he called a pattern of tasteless comments by MSNBC anchors about the Clinton campaign. Weeks ago, “Hardball” host Chris Matthews apologized to the former first lady after suggesting her political career had been made possible by her husband’s philandering.

Anchor David Shuster outraged the Clinton campaign by saying on the air that the campaign had “pimped out” the Clintons’ daughter, when they had her place phone calls to party superdelegates on her mother’s behalf.

Shuster has been made to apologize and has been suspended temporarily from on-air broadcast.

The funny thing to me on all of this is, really, who in the Clinton family hasn’t been our whorin’ for mama?  Not to mention she’s been shamelessly riding her hubby’s name and record from the get-go.  And if Bill hadn’t been all involved is scandal from getting his little Willy wet, would we ever have known Hillary for “standing by her man”?

When you bring your whole family into the political arena and use them to boost your campaign, it’s not unfair for others to comment on just how you’re using them.  Welcome to public life Hil.  Of course… that’s just my take.

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I’m not a supporter of John McCain’s candidacy for President, but…

Here’s a clip from a documentary attempting to debunk McCain’s honorable service as a Vietnam vet and POW. No matter which angle I try and understand the message the filmmaker is trying to communicate here, it still doesn’t come off well. And even if what they’re saying about McCain is true, America is very sensitive about her veterans. We don’t take accusations of cowardice lightly.

If we start pressing this button, support will flock to McCain in the form of Presidential votes. Someone needs to bury this flick quickly before the public views it as a Democratic tactic to sway votes. Perhaps it’s already too late.

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After the huge media blitz. After the late night of nail biting with CNN, CSPAN, and MSNBC. After torturing ourselves through the candidate speeches asking us to pray for the folks who lost their lives or were injured by the tumultuous weather conditions of the south. The commercial breaks and website updates. The time zone changes and sluggish outcome of California. Mormons. Christians. Blacks. Hispanics. Whites. Women. Youth. “Who are they voting for?” was the question that nagged the pundits and analysts alike.

Once it was all said and done and we collapsed from the excitement of the largest primary day in United States history, the final concluding results showed us that….

….nothing was decided.

Hillary and Obama are still neck and neck.

McCain, Huckabee, and Romney still don’t matter to a majority of America.

In conclusion: The primaries for the remaining handful of states who haven’t voted yet may actual matter this time around. And it’s also taught me that my hope of seeing a clear winner for the Democratic and Republican party nominations last night was a completely false hope.

Side note to announce some news coming down the wire right now. Hillary has just loaned herself $5 million of her own money due to lack of organic fund raising from the public. Obama is claiming upwards of $1 million in donations PER DAY. (The month of January brought his campaign $32 million.) Money talks.

EDIT Feb 7th 12:00 PM

______________ Hey, Skitz Here, sorry to interrupt- UPDATE!!!

Mitt Romney as of about noon today, has “suspended” his campaign. What does that mean exactly? Well in his words…

“In this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror. This is not an easy decision. I hate to lose,” the former Massachusetts governor said.

“If this were only about me, I’d go on. But it’s never been only about me. I entered this race because I love America, and because I love America, in this time of war I feel I have to now stand aside for our party and for our country.”

So while the Dems continue to be divided evenly between their two candidates, the Reps have decided it’s time to start putting forth a united front to increase their chances of winning the Presidency. Will this move pay off for them? (good god I hope not. heh heh heh…)

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No, really.
The police have been giving bootleg sellers strict orders not to sell Rambo, as it features the title character fighting against the oppressive military regime, and highlighting the brutal actions of the gov’t against it’s people.  Copies of the flick are being snatched by the police, and two local actors who appeared in the movie have reported arrests among their family members. 

Burma’s population is eager to shake off 45 years of military rule, and Rangoon residents said the film’s “live for nothing, die for something” tagline is appealing for young viewers.

The military junta cracked down on pro-democracy activists, many of them Buddhist priests, last year. 

The film, which has lots of blood and guts, was largely panned by North American critics.

On it’s opening weekend Rambo was beaten in the boxoffice by Meet The Spartans, yet another in a long line of parodies in the vein of Epic Movie, Scary Movie, Date Movie, etc…

But critical acclaim and commercial success aside, anything that can inspire, uplift, and bring to light current world events, is what I call real success.

You can now return to the “Super Tuesday” fallout regularly scheduled by every major media outlet.

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Glad that’s outa my system. Can we please get on with it? I’ve got antsy pants.

Here’s some linkage for your Super Tuesday Primary pleasure:

• CNN Election center 2008
• California Election Results (A.K.A. The Jackpot State)
• USA Today’s Results (Most visually appealing election results for all 24 states, says I.)
• And when you’re tired of all the pundits, statistics, and guesstimations….. The Onion’s “War For The Whitehouse” Super Tuesday Edition might refresh your brains.

I never thought I’d be this excited for Wednesday to come.

EDIT 5:53PM CST

Getting my Super Tuesday jollies on at work with the combined forces of Google Maps and Twitter!

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Create a caption. You know you wanna.

This photo is listed alongside the Breitbart.com article, “Iran Opens Space Center, Launches Rocket“. I had to check my source. I thought I’d stumbled upon an article from The Onion.

But quoteth the Iranian President Ahmadinejad, “We need to have an active and influential presence in space.” Which is, apparently, looking at it through a pair of 3-D glasses allocated from last years showing of Shrek Live! in 3-D.

Should we be worried about these Iranian ambitions? Not if that picture’s any indication of the threat.

EDIT 11:10 PM

Then again, we aren’t exactly an intimidating force either…

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During my time as a medic in Iraq I treated soldiers, airmen, naval personnel, coalition forces, U.S. civilians, civilians from other countries hired by the U.S. and Iraqis.  I saw many local children over there- when I stood in the tower watching the nearby farming village, I saw them play soccer in the road, and bathe in the man-made waterhole outside the fence.
When I worked as an escort for the Iraqi patients, picking them up at the gate, bringing them to the hospital, I saw the children then too.  And on Emergency Response ambulance service- they were there.

Of all the casualties I saw over there, whether directly treating, or just passing while dealing with other patients- nothing was harder than seeing sick, injured, and in all too many cases- dying children. 

So when I came across this article in the Sun-Times, I couldn’t look away.

It’s too easy to lose focus on what’s going on, when trying to just focus on the big picture. 

More than 1,000 children were admitted to U.S. military hospitals during the three-year study period. (referring to a study done from Dec ‘01- Dec ‘04)
The study found that almost 6 percent of the pediatric patients in military hospitals died.

With no true front line or battle zone, the war makes children especially vulnerable to stray bullets and other combat hazards, one study author said. And with Iraq’s own medical system collapsing, families seek out the U.S. military to help their children with more conventional ailments.

We’re doing good things treating all of these kids, doing everything we can to save everyone we can- sometimes it’s not enough, but that’s the nature of medicine.  But as the article says, with no frontlines in this never-ending war, children are more vulnerable to injury from war related activity, and since we first invaded Iraq, the medical system there, like so many other public systems, collapsed. 

Sometimes it feel like chicken and egg… there are no easy answers in any of this.  And right now, at this exact moment, I’m not asking for one.  This moment, I’ll let that pass so that instead of pondering who to blame, and who to attack, and all of the wheel spinning and nonsense… instead of all that, take a moment to think about all the lives- ours, theirs, all of them- that have been affected by this war.  And once you’ve taken that moment, then maybe some of the answers will come.

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From the Chicago Tribune-

The biggest news of the record $3-trillion-plus federal budget that President Bush plans to propose to Congress on Monday may be the potential deficit that comes with it.

After years of White House boasting that it is getting the deficit under control – cutting it by $250 billion during the past two years – the administration appears ready to concede that the deficit will rise to $400 billion or more in the coming year. That’s a near-return to the record $413-billion deficit reached in 2004.

The deficit had come down to $163 billion, the Office of Management and Budget recently reported – with a projection that the U.S. should see a surplus in revenue by the year 2012.

But the combination of a slowing economy and the new economic stimulus that Congress and the president are pursuing – with about $150 billion in tax relief promised this spring, could be reversing the trend.

Yes- we’re in debt, getting worse, the economy sucks, people are going broke, the Gov’t wants to give us all money that it doesn’t have (I hope I wasn’t the only one wondering how THAT was gonna work out), and yeah… Who’s got warm fuzzies right now?

As usual, Bush will propose a significant increase in defense spending this year, as he has from the start, the Washington Post is reporting, and he will seek to slow the growth of “entitlement’’ spending such as Medicare, but he will have to concede that the deficit for 2008 and 2009 is on the rise again.

Medical care in our own country?  Screw that, we’ve still got other countries we’re busy wrecking so we can fix them.

The president, who refrained from vetoing any spending bills when Republicans ran Congress, also is wielding the veto pen with a new vengeance now that Democrats are in control – promising to veto any spending bill that doesn’t cut the “earmarks’’ that members of Congress like to send home in half.

Some, such as Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, are not convinced by the president’s newfound approach to restraint in spending.

“I see no credibility to the notion that, after the equivalent of six years of binge drinking, now there is this enormous guilt and desire to make up for it at this moment,’’ Ornstein has told the Tribune.

Years of binge behavior followed by questionable repentance… Our Prez wouldn’t know anything about that!

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Screen shot from opensecrets.org.

Quite a few prezzy candidates (or ex-Presidential Candidates) are suprisingly low on this list of top lobbyist campaign contribution recipients (Obama, Edwards, Huckabee…). But gee golly, check out the ol’ gal on top! She’s weighing in at almost twice as much as the next closest contender.

48 hours until Super Tuesday!

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