The charity to help victims of Hurricane Charley first raised it’s level of matching contributions from $100,000 to $200,000. Then it met the level.
If anyone donated to the cause after hearing about it on MO, well done!
In any event, I will leave the button on the sidebar until the next charity is highlighted by STG, which should happen about once a month. Keep an eye on it, and toss in a buck or two if so moved.
Posting will be lighter than normal over the next couple of days while I do some business travelling.
If you’re not finding good stuff here, check out the sites on my sidebar. Most of them never shut up.
Bush fails to get deserved credit for tax cut benefits
Handy charts show that the tax cuts helped everyone, but that the richest 20% saw the least help and actually pay a larger percentage of taxes than they did before the Bush cuts. Go check it out.
I don’t see this getting too much attention.
But I wonder how much coverage it would have received if it showed the opposite?
RUMOR: MCCAIN TO REPLACE CHENEY?
On Soxblog:
A more pressing question is whether true Conservatives can live with John McCain’s presence on the ticket and with it his de facto coronation as the 2008 front-runner? On behalf of all true conservatives, I’m here to answer with an emphatic yes. Look, I’m no McCainiac – far from it. While I find his life story inspiring, I also think he’s the vainest politician of our time, and his repeated thumbs to the administration’s eyes grew tiresome years ago.But, and this is the big thing, he’s right on the war on terror. I’m passionate about the full range of issues that most conservatives are, but for me the war on terror trumps them all. By a lot. And McCain has been out front on the GWOT since day one. He was rattling his saber at Saddam before we were even in Afghanistan. Since he’s so right about the biggest issue, I can live with everything else. Besides, Churchill wasn’t much noted for his modesty either.
None of this is meant to denigrate Dick Cheney. I’ve always been a big fan, still am. But the stakes of this election are huge. If subbing McCain for Cheney will make a huge difference, as it likely will, it’s the proverbial offer we can’t refuse.
Go read the whole thing.
Via Instapundit, who writes:
I’d prefer Condi Rice, or Colin Powell, but this would be OK with me.
Powell would be my first choice, though I’d support both Rice and McCain wholeheartedly. One thing I hope the GOP is keeping in mind is 2008. Could McCain win in 2008? Against Hillary? I don’t see it.
My dream team would be Powell to VP, Rice to Secretary of State, Wolfowitz to NSA, and Cheney to Intel Czar (or whatever it will be called). (Maybe flip-flop Wolfowitz and Cheney. Not exactly sure what the bet fit would be there.) This would leave Powell primed to run with Rice in 2008. Hillary’s “first woman” card would be matched by Powell’s “first black man” card and done in by the addition of a woman as his running mate. Assuming (and that’s a big assumption) that the policies were on target, it would be game, set, and match.
McCain might bring the biggest bang for this November, but choosing him today might hurt in the long run.
Of course, this is all just hot air. But what in politics isn’t?
Busy weekend for me, but that doesn’t mean the world let up on craziness.
Madonna’s friends to join her in Israel
On MSNBC.com’s The Scoop:
The Reinvented singer — who has become a leading proponent of Kabbalah — will be making a pilgrimage to Tel Aviv in September to celebrate the Jewish holidays, and a source says that she will be joined by hunky actor Hugh Jackman and his wife, Deborra-Lee Furness, as well as Donna Karan.The source says the “Van Helsing” star and the designing woman have become “quite involved” in the controversial offshoot of Judaism. “We still haven’t gotten a confirmation from Demi [Moore] and Ashton [Kutcher],” says the insider. “[Moore is] shooting a movie [“Half Light”] in Wales and might not be able to join us.”
I wonder where she and all of her Kabbalah friends would pilgrimage to if the politics she claims to support were put in place. I’m pretty sure that Tel Aviv would not be a healthy place for any sort of Judaism if they were, being as it would be part of Syria or Lebanon or Palestine or something.
Fortunately, Tel Aviv is free and this sort of crap can go on as scheduled:
What’s more, says the source, the ABC news magazine “20/20” will be filming the entire event and interviewing the Kabbalah Centre’s leader, Rabbi Philip Berg — his first time ever on camera. A spokeswoman for the show told The Scoop, “I can’t confirm that.” Karan’s rep couldn’t be reached and Jackman’s said he had no info on the story.“It will be quite the media event for Kabbalah,” says the source. “This all comes a month before a publicity extravaganza in October, including a billboard on Sunset Boulevard to promote a book on the red string — which wards off the evil eye — as the got-to-have religious fashion accessory of the season.”
All seems pretty heartfelt, genuine, and sincere to me.
Maybe we could get all the Kabbalah celebrities to square off against all the Scientology celebrities in a fight to the death cage match. I’d pony up fifty bucks to watch that on pay-per-view.
Captain Ed analyzes the peace deal with Darth Sadr. Just go read it. And the comments section, which includes a lot of good conversation on the topic.
The Marines’ mission made simple
Donal Sensing points out a post at Marine Corps Moms that includes a letter from Colonel C.A. Tucker, commanding officer of RCT-7 in Iraq. Inluded in the letter is the colonel’s response to a question about the basic mission of the Marines in Iraq. Here is Colonel Tucker’s response, reformatted by me for this post:
This sounds like a man who plans to go about his business in a Marine-like manner.
Oorah.
Creating an Iraqi Army That Can Fight (Aug 27, 2004 entry)
On Strategy Page:
The new units have been in training for nearly a year. The units mix Shias, Sunnis and Kurds together. They are all volunteers and the American recruiters make sure they understand what they are getting into. That includes working well with people you would normally not work with. There are a disproportionate number of Kurds in the units, which has caused some concern within the Iraqi government. The Kurds have been basically independent from any Iraqi government since the early 1990s, and both Shia and Sunni Arabs are unsure if they will be able to make the Kurdish territories a real part of Iraq again. But once the Kurds train with the Arabs, and those who can’t handle the training are removed, the units come together. Only one of these battalions, the 36th battalion of the Civil Defence Corps, has been in action. But others are being recruited and trained.
See the SP post for more.
It’s been said many times and in many ways. The Iraqis are going to have to take more responsibility for their own security. Not only for the short-term reason of alleviating some of the pressure on US and allied troops, but because Iraq needs to be able to lift its chin up. Until they can realistically run their own nation, they are going to have trouble feeling proud about themselves, freed or not.
Multi-ethnic units like these commando-type forces can help lay the foundation for an Iraq where the different groups tolerate each other and identify themselves as Iraqis first. It won’t really begin to take hold, of course, until the Iraqis that are young children today are running the country, but the seeds need to be planted. This is going to take a long time and it will require a lot of patience.
(I have no idea if the Iraqi soldier identified by FoxNews as a “Special Forces” soldier last April was a member fo the 36th batallion of the Iraqi CDC. If he was, amybe FoxNews wasn’t too far out of line.)
Report: Bush admits Iraq ‘miscalculations’
On MSNBC.com from Reuters:
President Bush acknowledged for the first time on Thursday that he had miscalculated post-war conditions in Iraq, the New York Times reported.The paper quoted Bush as saying during a 30-minute interview that he made “a miscalculation of what the conditions would be” in post-war Iraq.
I’ve written before that Bush would probably be better served by honestly admitting that everything hasn’t gone in Iraq exactly like he hoped it would. My point was that he could admit that the occupation was tougher and more expensive than originally planned for without having to say that the entire campaign was unjustified. I still completely beleive this to be the case, and if this report is accurate he may be (finally) doing just that.
A lot of Bush supporters said I was wrong for wanting the President to admit any sort of an error because the Lefties and the press would jump all over him and blow it all out of proportion.
Now that Bush has (finally) done something along these lines, I’m very curious to see how the press and the opposition will spin it.
(One thing that immediately comes to mind is that with the RNC convention kicking off and Kerry floundering so terribly, the Bush team may have decided that there wouldn’t be a better opportunity, politically-speaking, to “come clean” about some of this. Yes, it’s political maneuvering. But it means that the Bush team thinks Kerry is dead in the water, whatever side of the border he’s on. They wouldn’t be doing this right now if they thought Kerry was in a spot to hurt them with it. Of course, that doesn’t mean that Kerry and his allies won’t try.)
You can blame NASA for the peculiar weather
I mean, it HAS to be satire. Doesn’t it? There’s no way ANYONE wrote that and meant it.
Especially the “beekeepers” part.
Still, the guy’s in Michigan so it might help explain the plight of swimwear salespeople in this state.
But still.
I mean, come on.
(hat tip to Rand Simberg)
