Rumsfeld On Looting...

Just a reminder, in case anyone's memories have been surgically removed by the Department of Homeland Security, this is what Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had to say when a reporter asked him for his thoughts on the looting in Baghdad after the American invasion in 2003...

From CNN.com...

"Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things," Rumsfeld said. "They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here."

Looting, he added, was not uncommon for countries that experience significant social upheaval. "Stuff happens," Rumsfeld said.

Freedom is untidy. Stuff happens. Remember that when you're watching coverage of the destruction in New Orleans, Louisiana.

And Suddenly, Poof! It's All Over

Via a new blog I haven't seen before, The Oil Drum... comes this terrible news:

WASHINGTON (AFP) - At least 20 oil rigs and platforms are missing in the Gulf of Mexico and a ruptured gas pipeline is on fire after Hurricane Katrina tore through the region, a US Coast Guard official said.

The anonymous source quoted at The Oil Drum had this to say before that report hit the wires:

There are MANY production platforms missing (as in not visible from the air). This means they have been totally lost. I am talking about 10's of platforms, not single digit numbers. Each platform can have from 4 to 100+ wells on it. Most larger ones have 20-30 wells in this area, with numerous caisson wells. They are on their sides, on the bottom of the gulf - they will likely be left as reef material, provided we can get permission. MMS regulations require us to plug each of the wells that were on these platforms - HUGE cost now, as the platforms are gone... Hopefully, MMS will grant `abandon in place' status for these wiped out structures.

We also set individual wells as satellites and pipe them back to existing platforms. These stand-alone wells are called caisson wells. 90% of those in the storm path are bent over, rendering them a total loss, We would have to remove the existing bent structure and drill a new well, as bent pipe is basically unusable.

We utilize platforms as gathering hubs. We pipe the raw oil/water to them and then send it on for separation, or separate it there and send finished oil on. Damage to a hub means everything going to the hub is offline indefinitely. There are +/- 15 HUBS missing. MISSING!! As in we cannot find them from the air.

Thus even if the wells feeding the hub are ok, we have nowhere to pump the oil to...

Ah yes, the vengeful wrath of the space-god... I can hear the thunder cracking now.

If you don't know what this news means, then I humbly suggest you carefully inspect your usual sources of economic news and information for qualifying language in the reports you are getting for telltale phrases like "depending on how long it will take to bring the equipment back online" and discount their happy-talk until they sober up.

Well That Didn't Take Long...

Via His Most Terrible and Unholy Shrillness, Professor Brad DeLong, we find today that Private Doughy Pantload, i.e. Jonah Goldberg, was born with a crippling impairment to his sense of humor gland.

The Corner on National Review Online: ATTN: SUPERDOME RESIDENTS [Jonah Goldberg] I think it's time to face facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While you're working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he's not expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young fighters around you and tell the womenfolk you will feed and protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the earth with a race of gilled-supermen. It's never too soon to be prepared.

Won't someone please take up a collection to pay for Jonah to have the brain surgery he so desparately needs to be a fully functional and well-adapted adult in a civil society? I'd do it myself, but I don't think a pseuonymous blogger ought to be asking people for money unless they've got a lot more invested in their pseudonym than me.

Haiku Of The Week

By Lake Ponchartrain
Bartender, please set me up
The levee done breached

Some Cheese With Your Whine?

How is it the wingnuts can still be crying like bitches after all this time? I mean, they run the shop, don't they?

Don't They?

This intercept from The Junkyard Blog:

President Bush, who is ten times the man of Clinton with a hundred times the courage, has done some big, noble, courageous things on our behalf. We bloggers have tried to maintain support for him but most Americans still don’t read blogs.

Suffering Jeebus… would you like some cheese with your whine?

You asshats own all three branches of government, and now your crying like sissies because none of it works like you thought it would?

What needs to be done? Well, the administration needs some big gun surrogates. It needs its aggressive spokesmen who, like Carville and Begala and their comrades, stick to a small set of talking points and hammer them 24/7 on the airwaves. These big guns must be already famous conservatives who can articulate the cause with passion and conviction, not a gaggle of bloggers and hangers on no one’s ever heard of. Bloggers aren’t enough.

Holy Cats! The Wingnuts have their own 24 hour a day propaganda network that is the highest rated of the three propaganda networks, there are your news papers, there is the never ending clamor of AM hate radio… And you losers still feel like your message isn’t getting out…

How badly must it suck to be you…

CNS News reporting the Code Pink attacks on Walter Reed aren’t enough. We need bigger guns in this battle, or we’ll lose.

Yeah… I saw the video… three aging hippies standing across the street with some signs. I’m surprised the Maryland National Guard wasn’t activated to meet this threat.

Really, what does it say to you that you have all this going for you, and yet the public doesn’t seem to be buying it from your perspective. Look around, there isn’t a shortage of microphones, and the Wingnuts have the biggest microphone in the world at their disposal… what ails you guys?

Either a. Your team sucks, or b. you agree with the president that a “dictatorship would really be much easier.”

mojo sends

The Texas Chain Saw President

This is just wrong. OMG. Wrong.

Funny as hell, tho...

The Army Field Manual Hates America

From the New Republic via Laura Rozen, Spencer Akerman in the New Republic addresses the drumbeat from the NeoCon Right that using Law enforcement methods in any way is futile and, well, limp wristed sissy talk. What I found fascinating in Laura's excerpt was this gem near the bottom:

Indeed, the real danger--to the war on terrorism, American values, and the rule of law--is unchecked executive authority. There would be nothing wrong with keeping detainees at Camp Delta and elsewhere if they were provided legal protection and their interrogations were restricted to the Geneva Conventions-compliant Army Field Manual on interrogations. Nor would there be any harm to national security. Senator Graham, a former Air Force JAG, stated two weeks ago that, when he recently visited Guantánamo, he asked "all the interrogators there: Is there anything lacking in the Army Field Manual that would inhibit your ability to get good intelligence? And they said no. I asked: Could you live with the Army Field Manual as your guide and do your job? They said yes." Whether the Bush administration can live within those rules is another matter.

Now, lets consider that famous Quote from Willam on the Factor when he claimed"

"Clearly, more pictures of Abu Ghraib help the terrorists, as do Geneva Convention protections and civilian lawyers. So there is no question the ACLU and the judges who side with them are terror allies.

The degree to which these people will bend themselves into pretzels to try to stick to the party line is astonishing. By Williams logic, not only is the ACLU a "terror ally" for attempting to hold the Pentagon accountable, but the Army field manual and the terrorists that wrote it apparently are on the bus.

This is truly an amazing feat of agitprop that is being attempted here. Instead of accepting that the Administrations abandonment of 50 years of legal and moral reasoning on the treatment of prisonors and use of torture was wrong, O'Reilly and the rest of these moral reprobates simply declare torture justified. Simply tilt the board when the rules are inconvenient. Outstanding!

Oh Army Field Manual! Stop hating America..pretty please?!!

Erosion of Rights

Once again, from the redoubtable Lindsay over at Majikthise:

Garbage, privacy, and the law

The Supreme Court of Montana recently ruled that citizens have no expectation of privacy with regard to the contents of their trash.

Read Justice James C. Nelson's remarkable concurring opinion. [via CNET]

That really was a remarkable opinion, if for no other reason it was amazingly introspective and personal for a piece of legal reasoning.

And to me, it was kind of refreshing, given the enormous amount of obtuse and ponderous legal writing I wade through every day.

But unfortuantely, I wish he had taken the final step as he threatened to at the end of his opinion, and just dissented, drawn the proverbial line in the sand and said "no, this is the limit to which we are going to allow invasions of privacy."

However, this is also a good example of how slowly law evolves and if you aren't watching closely one morning you wake up and find out that the rights you always seem to take for granted, or at least who's existence you didn't need to question, suddenly don't seem as imutable as they once did.

Thanks to the slow erosion of Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections, not one big reality changing decision just small changes over time, his reasoning was actually the "legally" correct one.

Thanks a lot legal positivists...

mojo sends

Baby Blogging

I don't have a cat, and my dog objects to having her picture taken because she believes it steals your soul. So, I decided to start baby blogging. This is my son Alex. We took this picture right after we told him who was President. His upper and lower fangs just came in, and he is able to exsanguinate his own prey, after we bonk it on the head a bit. He is also developing a high pitched scream that his doctor believes is how he will stun and paralyze his prey.

Friday Cat Blogging

I am continuing what seems to be a pathological compulsion in certain parts of the blogosphere... the obsessive need to show people pictures of my cats.

So, for your edification, I give you:



These are my cats, Piper and Desdemona.

And yes, they are plotting your downfall...

mojo sends

Explosion in Downtown San Francisco

It happened about an hour ago. I haven't turned on the radio or the television. Here's what KCBS, our local CBS News affiliate, posted on its website. No one killed. One person injured. FBI says it was "electrical in nature, possibly related to construction going on in the area."

Unfortunately for me, I found out about it by surfing Freeperville. Check out the comments in this discussion thread.

To: Reeses

Gay terrorists?..........

5 posted on 08/19/2005 10:07:44 AM PDT by Red Badger
(Want to be surprised? GOOOOGLE your own name. Want to have fun? GOOOOGLE your neighbor's......)

---

To: Reeses

Live-fire practice for the Harvey Milk memorial gerbil pyrotechnic show.

15 posted on 08/19/2005 10:09:05 AM PDT by RichInOC
("ARMAGEDDON!!!" *BOOM!* "And the rodents' red glare...gerbils bursting in air...")

---

To: zarf

Gay Days celebration?---- Heckfahr, that's every day there, ain't it? LMAO

26 posted on 08/19/2005 10:10:41 AM PDT by Past Your Eyes
(Some people are too stupid to be ashamed.)

---

To: Mr. Mojo

I hope we won't surrender CA to the Palestinians because of this.

Why not?

41 posted on 08/19/2005 10:12:59 AM PDT by dubyaismypresident
(The constitution is not in exile, it's in a nice safe deposit box in the Cayman Islands - Lileks)

When you live in a city as old as San Francisco, you learn not to be too surprised when the infrastructure occasionally explodes. This sort of thing happens because of poor attention to occupational health and safety concerns a lot more often than it does because some terrorist sets off a bomb. I've lived in San Francisco for more than ten years, and I can remember at least a dozen similar newsworthy events in that time— and none of them were terrorist bombs. Yet, look at how Freeperville reacted.

More to the point, look at how Freeperville is reveling in the destruction caused by what they have idiotically assumed was a terrorist attack. One can only imagine what the comments removed by the moderators contained. Remind me again why I should quit my job, sell my house, leave my family and join the Army to defend the way of life these choads think I owe them. (No, I'm not in a big hurry to do that, but they keep insisting that somebody, somewhere should— and I find it's like pulling teeth to get them to tell me who they have in mind for it.)

America: The Power of PRIDE.

For The Record...

I know the physical resemblance is remarkable, but I am not The Rude Pundit.

I do admire his work, though... you can see it here. (Note: text at link usually contains very profane language.)

This is amusing...

Raw story via Mark Kleiman passes on this little tidbit. Now, it's hard to know what is the exact truth here. But does anything these people do surprise you anymore. I would dearly love to examine the Grand Jury testimony in the Plame case just to confirm this story.

This is my favorite quote:

"For two years, the assistant who answered Rove's phone was a woman who had previously worked for lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a close friend of Norquist's and a top DeLay fundraiser," Salon reported. "One Republican lobbyist, who asked not to be named because DeLay and Rove have the power to ruin his livelihood, said the way Rove's office worked was this: 'Susan took a message for Rove, and then called Grover to ask if she should put the caller through to Rove. If Grover didn't approve, your call didn't go through.'"

Penalty for Early Withdrawal

From Atrios: The problem is that the jingosphere who are well represented in the administration believes that as long as the insurgents want us to "get out" then we can't get out because that would be doing what they want.

So we are already back to this point, huh? Really, in the scope of history, the United States is like that best friend who’s really talented but has some serious addiction problems. They go straight for a while and it’s all good, then it’s back to the spike and all your friends watch you go through the same depraved steps all over again.

This step? The Declare-Victory-And-Go-Home phase. About two weeks ago, the AP’s military writer Bonny Robert Burns broke this story:

“The Pentagon is laying the groundwork for beginning a withdrawal from Iraq, even as it is weighing the risk of moving so quickly that Iraqi security forces collapse without U.S. support.

The benefits of a U.S. drawdown are pretty clear. Fewer troops would likely mean fewer casualties and less strain on the Army and Marine Corps, which already are stretched thin. And it would lessen the degree to which the presence of foreign forces fuels an anti-U.S. insurgency.”

This also comes at a time of new poll numbers that show most Americans believe that a half-trained rhesus monkey, or perhaps a small ball of drier lint could do a better job of handling the Iraq and national security than Maximum Leader.

Beware the Ides of March, W. Right now, your clout on the hill is getting a little thin, I’m thinking. Hence a run up to a hasty retreat from Mesopotamia? And that’s what this would be, nothing more; the U.S. military, due to lack of decent civilian political leadership is going to get run out of Iraq by a handful of Iraqi thrillbillies and a few guest stars.

Oh, sure, we’ll have the big victory homecoming parade, with yellow ribbons, marching bands, heroic music and “Mission Accomplished” banners everywhere. We’ll talk about the stunning performance of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines in breaking the back of Saddam Huessein’s military, capturing the Butcher of Baghdad, killing his two murderous sons and so on…

And what will we leave behind? Several million righteously mad and terrified Iraqis Sunnis, Shi’a and Kurds, a legacy of our own torture chambers and rape rooms to replace Saddam Hussein’s, a bloody civil war, that will almost certainly end with the creation of another Islamo-facist fundamentalist state, much like Iran, except for a semi-autonomous Kurdistan, which itself will destabilize due to the Turkish government’s inability to cope with the needs of their own Kurdish minority, along with water and oil money they will potentially be losing if a real independent Kurdistan movement gets going.

According to the Burns piece, the draw down of troops would start right after the elections for the new government in Iraq. Of course, that would be predicated on the actual existence of a new government in Iraq. Given that they don’t look like they are anywhere near being able to complete a new Iraqi constitution by the August 15 deadline, there is some legitimate questions about whether there will be a new government for anyone to vote for come the fall.

And of course, that would also be assuming that the Iraqi military was certified as combat ready and the that the current insurgency/proto civil war doesn’t get any worse, especially with the prodding of Iran, Syria or Wahabist-backed groups from the Saudi Peninsula or Pakistan.

Even now the signs of retreat advance, even though Sec Def. Rummy has yet to proclaim the victory, there are omens and portends that we are preparing to tuck tail and run from what even the administration insiders are now probably admitting to themselves was one of the worst geo-political blunders since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan… oh, hey that’s right, we’re playing that game there, too. So wemay have two of them back to back…sweet!

You might have noticed lately that the rhetoric has changed somewhat from “destroy all monsters” to “the Iraqi army needs to destroy all monsters.” Rummy has been publicly saying of late that the Iraq insurgency is an Iraqi problem and his commanders on the ground have been telling him this for a couple of years now.

Some other portends brought up by Burns:

One; after setting up shop and hanging out the “Open for Business” shingle, U.S. Ambassador to the new Caliphate of Baghdad, Zalmav Khalilzad announced the creation of a new joint task force to deal with security issues, primarily in a way that transfers the responsibility from the U.S. forces to the Iraqi forces, allowing for a “phased pullout” in the ambassadors own words.

Next, there was the hand over of a complete area in the Divala Province northeast of Baghdad to Iraqi police and a brigade of the 5th Iraqi Army Division. A spokesman for Gen. George Casey said the transition was an example of how the Iraqi units were learning to fight without U.S. help. In spite of the fact that desertion is still rampant and that many units are reporting that they are rife with insurgent sympathizers and moles.

Finally, last Monday, Mowaffak Rubaie, the Iraqi Naitonal Security Advisor said that several more stable cities in the north and south have been identified and are ready for pull backs of U.S. and British forces, predominantly in places like Karbala and Najaf as well as the more predominantly Kurdish north.

But there is still a larger picture to see here. Why, after all the talk does W suddenly need to get the hell out of Iraq as quickly as possible? Is he really worried that the poll numbers indicate that people just don’t like him that much? Hey, politicians have this weird fetish to be liked by people, so that could be a strong psychological motivator.

But there is an even bigger reason. Namely 535 reasons, collectively called the U.S. Congress, especially the House of Representatives. These people have to start gearing up for reelection here within the next few weeks. Labor day is right around the corner, and those who don’t have a complete machine in place by Thanksgiving can pretty much just start sending out resumes. And the last thing they need as they head into a contentious election season is for this lemon of a foreign policy blunder to be hung around their necks.

Sure, they will stand shoulder to shoulder with the President for the photo op, (and even those are getting scarce) but in private, it is said, they are complaining bitterly about the lack of a clear victory in the war and the public’s perception of the war, or more to the point, the complete incompetence of the Bush Administration in handling the public perception of the war, much less its actual prosecution.

And moreover, a lot of these guys are worried about decorated Blue Staters getting home from the war and deciding they can run things better in Congress than their Chickenhawk incumbents. Already the GOP attack machine is running 110 percent on the reactors to try to deal with this situation.

And now you have mouth-breathing scumbags like Rush Limbaugh viciously attacking Democrats in uniform, like Marine Corps officer and Iraqi War vet Paul Hackett who nearly upset a highly favored Republican candidate in a special Congressional election in Ohio earlier this month. Limbaugh accused Hackett of being just another liberal democrat hiding in uniform.

Hey Rush, I’d rather be a liberal “hiding” in uniform, than being a dirtbag coward trying to hide my Oxycontin-stoned, 12-double-burgers-a-day eatin', lard-encrusted corpulence, all stuffed under my bed crying like a sissy when the call came to serve my country you low-life social retard!

But beyond the mid-term elections, there would only be one reason for the Bush administration to give up on its dreams of a pan-Arab WalMart extending from the Port of Haifa in Israel to all the way to Islamabad in Pakistan. And that’s to make sure that Jeb won’t have to run against his brother’s idiotic failures on the ground in prosecuting a needless and costly war.

But that sort of move would have to come fairly soon. Say, with a full retreat in process by the midterm elections, so that we could start having the victory parades and ginning up the necessary revisions to recent history, so that by 2008, the entire mythology will be complete and Jeb won’t have to worry about being asked about how he’s going to win the war in Iraq that his brother couldn’t.

Of course, Iraq will have completely gone to hell in a handbasket by then, but that will all be the U.N’s fault for letting Iran and Syria sabotage the country once we left with Al Qaeda terrorist cells imported fresh from France. There will be no questioning of the official story, to do so will be an act of treasonous disrespect for our valiant fighting men who defeated the forces of Eurasia in service to the greater good of Oceania, and secure in that knowledge, we will all rest easier knowing that yet another Bush has his hands on the helm.

Of course, the 2008 election will be a mere formality, those results were negotiated years ago…

No More Bets Please...

This is President Bush on October 16, 2002:

“Like the members of Congress here today, I've carefully weighed the human cost of every option before us. If we go into battle, as a last resort, we will confront an enemy capable of irrational miscalculations, capable of terrible deeds”

This is President Bush on May 3, 2003:

"The use of force has been, and remains, our last resort," he said. "Yet all can know, friend and foe alike, that our Nation has a mission: We will answer threats to our security, and we will defend the peace."

And this is also President Bush:

"All options are on the table," Bush, speaking at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, said in the interview broadcast on Saturday. Asked if that included the use of force, Bush replied: "As I say, all options are on the table. The use of force is the last option for any president and you know, we've used force in the recent past to secure our country."

However, this statement was made yesterday, August 13, 2005 and in this last quote he is referring to Iran, not Iraq.

That's it ladies and gentlemen, the bones are rolling, no more bets...

mojo sends

Rohrabacher Caught up with Abrahoff?

Interesting note on the Abramoff scandal in the Washington Post story this morning, it noted towards the end that one of my favorite Republican sociopaths in Congress, Dana Rohrabacher, either co-signed or was some sort of reference on the Abrahamoff boat loan.

Now for reasons that many of you know, I have a speical place in my heart of Dana. My question is just how far does Dippy Dana's involvement with Abramoff go?

Could this scandal actually expand to encomass Rohrabacher? Could this be the final bit that makes the Orange County GOP just finally cut him loose?

Will any local media pick up on this story?

mojo sends

Update 1.0: s9 informs us that apparently Dana was merely a personal reference for Abramoff's loan. You know, while it's supposed to be a character witness kind of thing, it's really that list of people the loan officer wants so he knows where to send the collectors to look for you once you skip town on your note.

Orcs Terrified Of The Nazgul

Over at The American Street, Lance Mannion invokes one of our favorite memes here at The MojoWire: analogies between conservatarian ideologues and the minions of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. (Note: he cross-posted this at his own place.)

Let me quote discretely from his excellent take:

They think like the squabbling orcs in The Two Towers who start a conversation cursing the elf warrior they've imagined has left the paralyzed Frodo to be eaten by Shelob— regular elvish trick— and finish it laughing about the time they left a paralyzed comrade to be eaten by Shelob.

"D'you remember old Ufthak? We lost him for days. Then we found him in a corner; hanging up he was, but he was wide awake and glaring. How we laughed! She'd forgotten him, maybe, but we didn't touch him— no good interfering with Her...

Orc-like they hate in their enemies what they love in themselves. Or, in other words, what they hate most is catching sight of themselves in mirrors of their own devising that they have fumblingly held up to their own faces.

The orcs are at it with Cindy Sheehan, hating her for making them confront the reflections of their own chickenhawkery and political hackishness.

She's using her son's death for political ends! Regular elvish trick! How dare anybody use something like a war to advance their own political cause!

I think it's safe to say that Lance has joined the ranks of the Order of the Shrill.

Hackett Lost; Time to Get Up Off the Mat!

An open statement to all my brothers and sisters out there in outer Blogovia representing for the Progressive Cause...

I like Paul Hackett, I like everything about him and I look forward to seeing him back in 2006 to break a big blue boot off in Schmidt's scrawny ass...

But I am so past-tired of taking delight in "moral victories" for the Democratic Party. This was not a win. If this was a win, then we'd have the Ohio 2nd in the blue column.

Do we? No?

Then we lost. Quit congratulating yourselves for a fight we didn't win. Yeah it was close, and that's a good thing. Time to get up off the mat and get ready to fight even harder next time.

Take that vacuous cow's words along with the transcript from everyone's favorite fatass drug addict mouth-breathing scumbags and post that shit up on the locker room wall. Look at it everytime you think you don't have the energy to go to that next meeting or make just one more phone call.

Look at it: "Hackett's just another liberal hiding behind the uniform" and let the bile rise... then suit up, get out there and kick some ass!

mojo sends

P.S. Hey Rush, I’d rather be a liberal “hiding” in uniform, then being a dirtbag coward trying to hide my Oxycontin-stoned, 12-double-burgers-a-day, lard-encrusted corpulence stuffed under my bed crying like a sissy when the call came to serve my country you low-life social retard!

Byrnes Canned?

From Linday at Majikthise:

The official story is that General Byrnes was fired for an extramarital affair with a civillian. Allegedly, the Army terminated Byrnes to show how serious it is about moral values. Mark Kleiman notes irony: torture innocents, no problem; commit adultery, you're accountable. This doesn't pass the sniff test. Is it possible that someone wanted to punish Byrnes? For example, might he have said anything inconvenient about the Army and its recruiting goals? If anyone has any alternative hypotheses about Byrnes demise, they're eligible for one of these tinfoil medals that I am empowered to bestow.

Well, if we are entertaining flights of fancy, then here's one...

Byrnes might have been spaced out the airlock in a nasty political fight with a rival...

Tin foil hats on, everyone? Good...

One of the last major promotions made before the current junta took power was the tapping of Byrnes to be Lt. General in 1999. He was still at his post at that time as commanding general of the 1st Cav. In 2003, W punted him over to TRADOC taking him out of rotation for combat duty in the gulf. Why? Who knows...

But, while at TRADOC, he very quickly initiated a project called LandWarNet, a massive information integration command and control infrastructure that is -- eventually -- supposed to completely revolutionize the way data is used adminsitratively and on the battlefield.

So far so good... however, while he was working on this, a General Steven Boutelle, U.S. Army's G6 (or the Army's Chief Information Officer) was about to go to Congress and testify regarding funding for his pet project, called the "Army Knowledge Management Strategy."

In an April 2004 interview, Byrnes talks about how:

"The G6 has made significant headway for the institutional Army under the Army Knowledge Management Strategy. Now it is time to integrate the operational Army into a capstone strategy that is LandWarNet. The LandWarNet initiative will also establish the Army’s future networking efforts with the joint community, specifically in the joint battle management command and control development process.

In essence "thanks for all your help Steve, me and TRADOC will take it from here..." It ws shortly thereafter that Boutelle was sent up the Hill to pimp for LandWarNet, instead of his own deal, but as CIO, he really has little implementation control or funding access to it, since it is now a TRADOC program.

My theory turns on the idea that these guys are getting to the end of their useful shelf lives as flag officers. It is not uncommon for retired flag officers to "double dip" -- that is, take a pension, then get a job as a "consultant" with the Dept. of Defense, or just simply go to work as a pimp for any of the numerous defense contractors looking to open doors at the Pentagon.

And make no mistake, whoever ends up running LandWarNet is going to be in charge of majorly -- majorly-- phat stax of mad bank.

The fact that G6 technically outranks the TRADOC commander in the chain of command, although Boutelle was a three-star as opposed to the four stars of Byrnes is something I found interesting in the context that LandWarNet is something that is more naturally suited to the G6 command instead of Training and Doctrine, or so it would seem to me.

Boutelle's resume is not nearly as combat command intensive as Byrnes' and moreover he has not been in as long, making his bones as one of Rummy's hand-picked technocrat Tom Clancy desktop generals.

For Byrnes to have essentially seized a multi-billion dollar hardware and software intiative out from under Boutelle is the sort of thing that makes hard feelings in Washington.

After seeing Byrnes' resume, it seemed unlikely that a mere pecadillo would be the sort of thing that would force him out... what's the old saying in politics "unless he's found with a live boy or a dead girl, he's got job safety..." I think there's more to his ouster than just a dalliance.

Personally, I think the thing to watch for now is to see if G6 regains complete control of the LandWarNet project, and to see if one of his minions ends up running TRADOC... I would also be interesting in knowing more about the contractors bidding for LandWarNet projects and who in the Pentagon they are close to...

mojo sends

135 Things Jabba Is No Longer Allowed To Do In The USAF

It's derivative, but highly amusing. Pick your favorite thing and put it in the comments.