Asymmetric

I don't believe in conspiracies, but this sounded a little fishy to me. I'll say it's just a coincidence to keep my unblemished record of non-paranoia. Anyways, three governors recently chose to take cheap shots at the president with the following poll-tested idiocies:

First Ted Strickland:

I remain concerned for the continued and unprecedented sacrifice our men and women in the Ohio National Guard bear in relation to the ongoing conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere," wrote Mr. Strickland. "As Governor of Ohio, I will continue to press for assurances that every Ohio Soldier is provided with the most up-to-date equipment and that every Ohio Soldier receives appropriate training. As I have expressed earlier, our Soldiers and their families deserve nothing less."

He asked for a "timely" response to his request for Mr. Bush's assurances that Ohio soldiers will be provided with the most modern equipment, including individual body armor systems, M-4 rifles, and other weapons systems, night vision devices, and up-armored type vehicles, as well as proper training using that equipment before deployment.

What? Does Strickland have any evidence that any soldier has not received these things? No, he just wants to create a buzz. When he's called on it, he'll say something like "I just wanted to make sure because I care."

Soldiers will get what they need for the mission. I got body armor and I wasn't even a front line soldier. The M-4 is just a shorter M-16. Night vision? Everybody? What kind of person thinks a commander will send soldiers on a night mission without being able to see?

And all Humvees in Iraq are up-armored if they go outside the wire.

And they train for three months before leaving. If Strickland was so concerned he should have sent a letter to his generals telling them to get ready.

Grace Napolitano and Bill Richardson:

They're both tired of illegal immigration and want it to stop now!

Gov. Janet Napolitano has accused the Bush administration of undermining security along the Arizona border and demanded that the State Department stop recruiting Border Patrol agents for duty in Iraq.

In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Napolitano and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said the State Department is "using U.S. taxpayer dollars to protect another country's border to the detriment of our own."

"This administration needs to decide whose security is more important, America's or Iraq's. We believe America's comes first," Napolitano and Richardson wrote.

The letter was in response to a State Department contract to have Virginia-based DynCorp hire 120 individuals with Customs and Border Enforcement experience. They are to stay in Iraq for one year, during which time they'll train Iraqis in the security of their country's border.

The State Department says the Bush administration is committed to improving border security both in the U.S. and Iraq.

Just kidding. They've resisted every effort to secure their border thus far. Lou Dobbs, the sometimes correct, sometimes credulous CNN commentator does.

But Napolitano has angered Republicans by vetoing anti-immigration legislation, including a proposal that would have allowed state and local police officers to enforce federal immigration laws.

Richardson has broached controversial immigration issues before. Since taking office in 2003, he has signed legislation to allow illegal immigrants to get a driver's license in New Mexico and for children of illegal immigrants to qualify for in-state college tuition.

Hey, why didn't Napolitano use the National Guard on the border before Bush did last year?

Napolitano

Richardson

Strickland

Who's next? Maybe Kennedy will send a letter asking for more lifeguards.

Photography experts say that have conclusive proof that the widely seen image is not, in fact, that of a giant hog, but of a boy posing next to an oblivious Michael Moore.

When confronted, the boy explained that he and a friend were hiking when they decided to take a shortcut across the exclusive Alabama golf resort, Piney Hills. "They usually don't let my kind walk around here so I was doing some sneaking when I ran into this big fella ten toes up and sleeping like a baby. I had my buddy take out the camera his ma gave him and take a picture. We didn't mean no harm."

Suspicion was first raised among forensic photographers when a computer enhancement revealed that the alleged hog had a baseball cap around the side of his head. "We were pretty convinced at first until we got to the top. We said, "hey! hogs don't wear caps." The photographers went on to explain that they didn't discover the hoax sooner because the cap was partially hidden by a ham sandwich.

Michael Moore, the filmmaker behind the Oscar winning film Fahrenheit 9/11, was furious and threatened to sue the boy's family for "everything they have, if anything. I expect to come here and get a little privacy. God knows I pay enough."

Michael Moore's latest film is "Sicko." It continues the Bizarromentary genre invented by German legend Leni Riefenstahl in the 1930s. The aim of a bizarromentary is to show how a documentary would look in the Truth-inverted Bizarro World, itself a creation of D.C. comic book pioneers Jerry Siegel and Canadian artist Joe Shuster for the Superman comic book series.

If I see that kid again, my security will do to him what Chaney's been doing to the US for eight years, F*** him up. Boarzilla my a**

"

Healthy democracies require spaces for political dialogue and debate to allow divisions about the future direction of the country to be addressed in peaceful ways," the Carter Center said.

Along with the above stance, the Carter center has taken firm stances on the issues:

1. Governments should not restrict access to coats and other outerwear if they want their people to stay warm.
2. Quick-flowing freeways require long stretches of unobstructed road.
3. Healthy democracies require elections to better know whom the people prefer as their leaders.

More alternative news from CENTCOM:

Photo - 1st Lt. Josh Rowan (left), of College Station, Texas, goes over some information with 1st Lt. Jeremy Tillman, of Walnut Ridge, Ark., at a meeting with the chairman of the neighborhood council in Rabi, Adhamiyah May 21. Tillman would soon be taking over for Rowan as a new platoon leader with B Battery, 2nd Battalion, 319th Airborne Field Artillery Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division. Photographer: Sgt. Michael Pryor.

Earning, maintaining trust of residents

31 May 2007
By Sgt. Mike Pryor
2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division

BAGHDAD — It’s the usual happy chaos when 1st Lt. Josh Rowan arrives at neighborhood advisory council member Abu Muhanned’s house for their weekly meeting – children running amuck in the yard, women crowded into the kitchen, and Muhanned standing in the doorway in pajamas and bare feet, a cigarette in one hand, jabbering into his cell phone.

He greets Rowan warmly and ushers him and his Soldiers inside his home nestled in eastern Baghdad’s Adhamiyah District. While a security team sets up on the roof, Rowan and Muhanned move to the living room to talk. By now, it’s a familiar routine.

It should be.

Muhanned’s house was the destination of Rowan’s very first patrol in Iraq, almost four months ago, and they have met regularly ever since to plan development projects for the area.

Today, however, will be Rowan’s last visit. Rowan, a platoon leader with 2nd Battalion, 319th Airborne Field Artillery Regiment, from College Station, Texas, is moving to a different job. The purpose of this final meeting was to introduce Muhanned to his replacement, 1st Lt. Jeremy Tillman, of Walnut Ridge, Ark.

“All I’m here to do is introduce Tillman and close the loop,” Rowan said.

In the Army, the only constant is change. Soldiers are always moving from one position to another and taking over different duties. But in Iraq, the challenge for new leaders like Tillman is, how do you take over a relationship? Rowan and Muhanned worked successfully together because they had a strong personal bond. Tillman will have to build that trust all over again.

“That’s the challenge of counter-insurgency warfare,” Rowan said.

“It’s difficult,” agreed Tillman. “It’s really just about the individual person’s personality.”

Over tea and cigarettes at Muhanned’s house, Rowan made a big show of introducing Tillman.

“Sir, I look forward to working with you,” Tillman told Muhanned, when Rowan was done.

“I will put my hand in your hand. You will protect me, and I will protect you,” Muhanned replied.

The meeting continued for almost two hours, with conversation bouncing from topic to topic. One minute they were talking about putting trash cans on the street corners, the next minute about a trip Muhanned’s son was planning and the next about security threats in the area. In between, Muhanned’s wife served a huge lunch.

When the meeting was over, Tillman said it had been an eye-opening experience. At his previous unit, the focus had been almost entirely on raids and kinetic operations. Tillman could only remember a few times when he had actually sat in an Iraqi’s house and talked.

“Here, they’re interacting. They’re constantly getting out there and talking to local leaders,” Tillman said. “The mindset is just totally different.”

Since the 2-319th took over its section of Baghdad in February, the paratroopers have adhered to classic counter-insurgency theory, balancing military operations with efforts to engage local leaders, build the economy, and improve essential services. Rowan said the strategy, though slow and difficult to measure, is showing results.

“People are moving here from other parts of Baghdad because they say this is a safe place,” he told his platoon members just before his last patrol with them. “It’s the little things that we are doing that are making a difference.”

In the end, it all boils down to personal relationships, said Capt. Jonathan Harvey, Rowan and Tillman’s battery commander.

The challenge when a key leader gets switched out is to maintain the existing relationships.

“You have to be very delicate in the hand over,” said Harvey, of Nebraska City, Neb. “Iraqi culture is big on trust.”

Harvey said he made sure Tillman had plenty of time to shadow Rowan and meet one on one with all his Iraqi counterparts.

“Back in the states, a change of command is nothing more than an inventory. Here, it’s a much more deliberate process,” Harvey said. “(For Tillman and Rowan) we took 11 days, and each day had a different leader engagement.”

Despite the introductions and the crash course he received on Adhamiyah’s kaleidoscopic array of political and religious groups and their rivalries, Tillman said he still has a lot to learn. It will take time to build up the kind of personal relationships that Rowan had, where he knew not just someone’s name, but their wife and son’s name and what brand of cigarette they smoked, too.

“I know the area. As far as terrain, how to operate, tactics - I know all that,” Tillman said. “What I need to learn is who I can trust.”

I think the Today Show has a wonderful opportunity to teach Americans about Cuba. It would certainly be rude to accept an invitation with the intent to criticize, however, a reluctance to make negative-but accurate- observations may leave the impression that the Today Show allowed itself to be exploited by the Castro government (and I don’t think the Today show donates advertising time to dictators). It should be an interesting week.

I'm sorry I have to miss it, but I have to be doing Army stuff and they make me wake up early.

7 P.M. Eastern time on Sunday, June 3rd, I will be live-blogging the debate as well as give an Asymmetric analysis afterwards. Be there. Well, there in front of your computer.

Many conservatives seem to believe Thompson is the answer to their political prayers. I'm not sure I understand this enthusiasm. On the issues, Fred Thompson is indistinguishable from the majority of the current field. Certainly, little of substance differentiates Thompson from Romney or those behind Romney (Giuliani and McCain are different in that they each have ideas that don't square with the rest of the Republican base).

Considering the the above, I surmise that Thompson excites people because of his style, which, admittedly, is good in a gruff, Teddy Bear kind of way. Is that a big deal? Well, it is if you think style helps win elections. And, for the swing voters who make up about twenty per cent of the electorate, you'd probably be right. If he has a better chance of winning next year, and his views are at least moderately consistent with mainstream conservatism, then it would be foolish not to support him.

Other than that tactical consideration, his decision is of little consequence.

One thing about Thomson, however, really gnaws my craw (and that hurts- a lot). Thompson runs as an outsider and has said that the "biggest problem confronting America is that the politicians have lost touch with the people. This is nothing more than patronizing dummy-talk.

Do you fall for this stuff? Are you saying that you wouldn't support a conservative initiative from a Thompson administration if the majority of the population didn't concur? Would you prefer an outsider who disagreed with your opinion over an insider who agreed with it? Come on, now-ridiculous.

If he enters, fine. I just hope he drops the phony, focus group tested, meaningless, "outsider" boilerplate.

If he doesn't run, it's no big deal.

As if anybody cared about his opinion, Castro declared his dismay at America's insistence that its economy not resemble Cuba's. Now that China has overtaken the United States in carbon emissions, he should have said something about them, no?

It used to be that kids learned about our nation's holidays in school and about sex at home. Things are reversed now. I polled my kids and only one out of the three received some sort of lesson on the meaning of Memorial day.

And what a missed opportunity to learn about something that's inspiring, democratic (everybody class, religion, and ethnicity has sacrificed at one time or another), and necessary. Remember parents, it's up to us to supplement our children's education.

"Who cares what they read as long as they read" not infrequently leaves the lips of many teacher's lounge loungers. They mean to say, of course, "at this time, it's more important that we encourage students to learn how to read than worry about whether what they're reading is accurate or encourages a healthy attitude." In other words, it's just prioritizing.

Oh my God! He's burning a book!

I understand the sentiment. After all, teaching children how to read is the reason teachers exist in the first place and teachers should be applauded for recognizing their responsibility.

Taken to an extreme, however, a reading uber alles mentality can lead to self-righteousness and zealotry. I've lived mostly in an academic environment and if you did as well, you know that being well-read in that environment is like being fast on a track team or brave in the military- it's what everybody aspires to and the primary criteria for human-worth measurement.

And, as hard as it is for some to admit, reading can sometimes be worse than not reading anything at all to which mothers who have lost their children to some cult or their husbands to the Playboy-Maxim maxim, "get as much as you can" can attest.

The first time I heard reading, in and of itself, criticized was in a quote by H.L. Mencken,

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

At that moment, Mencken earned a place at the adult's table in my mind (and he's sat there ever since, gloomily complaining about the noise coming from Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh in the kitchen). It's absolutely true. Think about it. One goes home and spends a few hours reading about somebody else's life if fiction or, if politics say, reinforcing the same opinions (is the 875th example of how taxes stimulate the ecomomy more enlightening than the 874th?). How does that make one into a better person (yes, you're reading an opinion. I see the irony)?

Wouldn't it be much better for that person to go out and help somebody instead of spending four hours a day reading how the world would be better if people helped each other? Wouldn't a woman be better advised to do something nice for her husband instead of read a romance novel? How about a guy play a game of ball with his son instead of reading Mickey Mantle's life story?

And where do people apply all of the knowledge they gain? Like some kind of knowledge arms race, people mostly expend reading energy to keep up with their enemies in verbal combat, making sure that they remember that the Crusades had a complex beginning to parry attacks on the Church. People also love (I'm projecting a little) to impress. I remember when somebody in the teacher's lounge brought up an interview Gore had given in which he said that he enjoyed the book "The Red and the Black" by Stendhal, and I said that I had read (great and I don't regret it). Oh! what a victory for me that day!

When I mentioned my newfound reading ambivalence to an academically-oriented friend of mine, he said, "How will you learn how to think," or "how will you think?" or something like that.

I thought about it and said, "Thinking doesn't end when you put down the book. For many, it might, just then, start."

Tom Wayne from Kansas City, MO is burning books because:

"This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today," Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books.

How arrogant! If people don't read in the quantity he thinks appropriate, they're not thinking (dumb). I wonder how many things, besides reading, he's accomplished? I don't think my brother's ever read a book, yet I know few men as decent (and wealthy) as him. It's funny because I know some people started feeling sorry for my brother after having read the beginning of the previous sentence.

Anyways, Wayne needn't worry. Nobody wanted the books because they're reading something else, or they're wealthy enough to avoid a trip to his store and order from Amazon.

Over the last few years, people are buying and publishing more-not less books with only a slight dip last year. And, those figures don't include blogs and other internet reading or people just copying stuff.

And this site reports that

Total book sales dipped 0.3% in 2006, to $24.20 billion, according to estimates released by the Association of American Publishers. Sales in the trade segment were up 2.9% in the year, to $8.28 billion, led by an 8.5% increase in the trade paperback category. Adult hardcover sales rose 4.1%. Sales in the children's segments fell, with hardcover sales off 2.0% and paperback down 0.6%. Sales do not include revenue from the Harry Potter series, which the AAP excluded to give a better sense of the overall trend in the children's market.

The largest gain in the year was recorded by e-books, where sales rose 24.1%, to a still tiny $54.4 million. Audiobook sales were down 11.7%. Other areas where sales fell were religion, off 10.2%; book clubs/mail order, down 3.0%; elhi, down 5.8%; and the "other" segment, off 11.3%. Sales were up 4.6% in the mass market paperback category, rose 2.3% in professional and 2.8% in the higher education segment.

The Red and the Black (Penguin Classics) by Roger Gard