And Her Visit to The Hague Will Be Memorable

Condi says she's "proud" of our invasion of Iraq.

Something tells me her post-Bush life is not going to include points of interest in Europe that aren't US Embassies (or other sanctuaries).

McSurge, McSame, McLame, McInane...

There are so many ways to pay tribute to this pasty robotic Bush Clone, aren't there?

I was partial to "McSurge"...but the use of "Surge" is buying into the Orwellian NewSpeak that the Bush Administration has reinvented.

There was never any "surge"in Iraq...it is just that the Bushies had not the cojones to call it what it was: an escalation.

McSurge and the New Hundred Year's War

There was already a Hundred Years' War. It was in France, fought by the French and the English, and it was long and bloody and not particularly fruitful.

Now McSurge claims that there should be a new Hundred Years' War, only this time in Iraq and Iran, and wherever else this nutty little whackjob wants to send American troops.

Between now and November, we should hang this idiotic proposal about his puffy neck like the Ancient Mariner's albatross.

40 Years Ago Today...

...LBJ told the world he was hangin' up his spurs, the lascivious old bastard.

I was tuned into POTUS08, XM radio 130, this morning when I heard his gravelly Texas drawl oozing out of my speakers mid-speech.

I remembered that in '68 Johnson had surprisingly announced that he was no longer in the running for re-election. It oocurred to me that this was probably the anniversary...why else would they be rebroadcasting one of his speeches? He would have had to have done it this time of year...

The speech was apparently 35 minutes long, so I guess I caught the last 20 minutes or so.

The announcement, at the very end, was jarring different from the tone of the rest of his speech. Much of what I heard was devoted to recapping history and progress in Vietnam. I enjoyed getting to hear most of it today, even though the whole time I kept thinking about the awful parallels with Iraq.

If only Bush had had such qualms in 2004, maybe we'd be out there by now. But no...he is not only ignorant, he's stubborn.

Salamanders, Crocodiles, and the War

DARPA is good for something besides weapons of mass destruction, after all.

Funded by a million dollar DARPA grant, some scientists think they are well on their way to solve the problem of mammalian limb regeneration, perhaps within 10 years or so.

Salamanders can regrow limbs quite easily. And like mammals, these amphibians have limbs with complex joints, bones, cartilage, nerves and blood vessels similar to mammalian limbs. And before you pooh-pooh the idea because of the size differential, the authors point out that crocodiles can even regenerate whole tails, which are comparable to human limbs in girth.

According to the article in this month's Scientific American, one of the key differences that prevents us from regrowing limbs is that mammals have fibroblasts that promote fibrotic scarring instead of making a layer of regenerative cells.

So if we can trick our cells into bypassing this fibrotic scarring, and supply the severed area with enough nutrients, we should be able to someday restore all these poor soldiers who are coming back from Iraq with missing limbs.

Five Years Ago for the Iraqis...

Yesterday I wrote about the U.S. casualties.

Today is dedicated to the Iraqi victims of this illegal war. Click on "IRAQI SECURITY FORCE & CIVILIAN FATALITIES.

Regardless of whose numbers you choose...they are in the six figures.

from npr.org:

World Health Organization: 151,000 (May 2003 - Nov 2007)
Johns Hopkins School of Public Health: 650,000 (March 2003 - July 2006)

I'll take Johns Hopkins and WHO over any BushCo jive.

And I've heard estimates of 80,000 Iraqi refugee women forced into prostitution in Syria and elsewhere.

Let us pray that this is the beginning of the end.