Hinessight

You’d think that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and George Bush would be best buddies, they think so much alike. Opening up the newspaper this morning, I saw the headline, “Iran’s president targets liberalism.” (same AP story here, with different headline) Let’s see. Ahmadinejad wants to strengthen fundamentalism in his country. He’s removing pragmatic veterans in the government and replacing them with inexperienced hard-liners. His administration is cracking down on independent journalists. He’s trying to drive liberal and moderate professors out of universities. Sure sounds like the president of the United States’ wet dream. Oh, except it isn’t just a dream; it’s reality.…

Wow, what a surprise: false information about Iraq. It turns out that the capture of high-level Al Qaeda operative Jumaa Al Saeedi actually occurred nearly three months ago, rather than last Friday as was originally reported. So what am I to make of all the breathless speculation I heard on Fox News about how taking Al Saeedi out was going to break the insurgency’s back? Every attack in Iraq since June 19 occurred when #2 was out of commission. Seems to me like there are plenty of #3s and below ready to be promoted.

I was proved wrong by a fill-in host for Mark Levin (another “Mark,” who I assume was Mark Simone). This afternoon I heard him blabbing about how Google has purposely jiggered with its search engine so typing in “failure” brings up, as the #1 result, the official biography of George Bush. Simone claimed that this shows the left-wing bias of Google, which he said has Al Gore on its board of directors. That’s false. Gore is a Senior Advisor to Google and a member of Apple’s board. But he was correct about the “failure” search. And it’s also true that…

Today, on KPAM’s Victoria Taft show, I listened to Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron Saxton blather on about out-of-control state spending. That’s a fiction. I proved so in my April post, “Oregon is not a high tax state.” In my blogger delusionality, I figured that would be the end of it. Politicians and talk show hosts would have learned the truth. My post would have changed the world. Sadly, the message obviously hasn’t gotten through. So I’ll sing my song again. Oregon ranks 36th out of the 50 states in state and local taxes as a percentage of per capita income.…

Now that the 9,400 acre Black Crater fire near Sisters, Oregon is nearly contained, the local weekly is asking why the fire wasn’t stopped when it was 50 to 100 acres in size, before it threatened residential communities. The Nugget newspaper’s answer: lack of resources. Sisters District ranger Bill Anthony is quoted: “The fix is, obviously, to make more resources available,” said Anthony. And that would take a considerable ramping up of funding. “I would say that that discussion needs to be between the citizens and the public representatives that represent them,” Anthony said. My wife and I are part…

It’s no wonder things are going so bad in Iraq. The U.S. military can’t even count. Images taken from drones flying over the recent massive pro-Hezbollah rally in Baghdad supposedly showed that 14,000 people attended the demonstration. The organizer of the march, Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army, said the crowd totaled one million. So who are you going to believe? I’d say, “none of the above.” An Iraqi working for the Los Angeles Times estimated there were at least 100,000 demonstrators. Tellingly, the story in which this estimate appeared said, “American military officials, eager to play down support for Hezbollah, put…