This Week’s WTF?!

ABQjournal Opinion: Letters to the Editor
Abortion Is Worse Than Dogfighting


So now we’re having a catatonic fit because people fight dogs? You gotta be kidding? Wanna know why were getting our fannies handed to us in Iraq and everywhere else for that matter? Wanna know why everyone on earth hates us. Because we put dogs, minnows and owls ahead of people. You shoot an owl in New Mexico and you’ll spend many moons in the local hoosegow. You murder a baby and you get another cruise to the Bahamas.

JAY TURNER
Albuquerque

http://www.abqjournal.com/opinion/letters/586070opinion08-14-07.htm

Rank

It turns out I’m not alone in my obsession with the Amazon Rank of my book. It’s a “known problem,” which sounds like something Rumsfeld would say — wasn’t it great to see him on Capitol Hill the other day, as uncooperative and unclear as ever? — but is actually a technical phrase. Anyway, I check “my” rank far too often. (I also try hard to think of it as “my book’s rank,” not my own personal rank.)

Recently, Amazon added several sub-ranks, or ranks within categories as opposed to the original rank among all books. While this gives me more to obsess over, it also may be fairer to compare my book to other computer books than to Harry Potter and Kurt Vonnegut. This new sub-ranking also reveals the problem of automated categorization. My book is doing well in the NT category, which is a surprise since it has nothing to do with NT. Of course, neither do books on CSS, which often show up in the same categories as my book. Oh, well, all numbers are equal. mjh

Amazon Rank

http://www.mjhinton.com/vista/

The Highs and the Lows of Rankings on Amazon – New York Times, By LYNDON STAMBLER

Forget writer’s block — many authors put their manuscripts aside because they cannot stop checking their rankings.

“There really should be a 12-step program,” said Harry Kirchner, a senior national accounts manager with Ingram Publisher Services, a book distributor that counts Amazon as a customer.

This Week’s WTF?!

ABQjournal Opinion: Letters to the Editor
Liberals Playing Politics With American Soldiers

LIBERAL DEMOCRATS and their liberal main stream media outlets— NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and MSNBC— love the Iraq body count of our good, brave and courageous men and women in uniform, who have freed 50 million people from the clutches of evil.
They pretend to be aghast at the death and dying of our soldiers, over 3,600 since the beginning of hostilities. The soldiers are personalized, individualized and minutely scrutinized and then splashed across the printed and electronic media as political points to gain votes by the insensitive liberals.
This is a macabre endeavor. Let’s put this into perspective. If the liberal Democrats and liberal main stream media are really concerned about death and dying of Americans, why don’t they give the same treatment to drunken-driving deaths (over 17,000 per year), murder victims (over 18,000 per year) or abortion of embryonic children (over 260,000 per year by Planned Parenthood alone)?
Why, because it does not fit their gruesome agenda. Wake up America. Don’t let the psycho-constipated ideas of the liberal Democrats and the liberal media suck you in. Think!
In the words of Edmund Burke, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Our good soldiers are maintaining our freedom and securing Iraq’s freedom.
The liberal Democrats and liberal media want to stand by and do nothing!
JOHN MOSMAN
Albuquerque
http://www.abqjournal.com/opinion/letters/584248opinion08-07-07.htm

Sarcasm doesn’t carry well in print. (It is also wise to remember sarcasm is always lost on some people, and it angers others, of course.) I’m hoping John Mosman is being sarcastic in his statements that “liberal Democrats” and our minions in the press (what we call “the corporate media” and hardly view as friends) are somehow happy over the worst foreign policy debacle of the last 50 years. This is the most nauseating of the conservative bile: “liberals” (sneer it) want failure and suffering in Iraq because — somehow — we see it benefiting our cause. This LIE must be countered every time it is uttered. Nothing in and about Iraq is benefiting anyone but arms dealers and undertakers.

As for the strawman of all those other “worse” causes of death: many people are as torn up about those as Iraq. However, none of those deaths can be laid at the feet of one man. None of those deaths can be blamed on the actions of a handful of horribly-misguided neoconmen. That’s what earns extraordinary outrage: We NEVER should have entered Iraq in the first place and every single death has been unnecessary. mjh

No Diversity

Bush Down to His Base of Support, By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer

birds of a featherWASHINGTON (AP) — To see the type of person who still backs him, President Bush need only look in the mirror. The president fits the composite of today’s Bush supporter: a conservative, white, Republican man, an evangelical Christian who goes to church regularly. …

The only subgroups where a majority of people give Bush the nod are Republicans (67 percent), conservatives (53 percent) and white evangelicals who attend religious services at least once a week (56 percent).

These are the same three subsets of voters who support Bush on Iraq.

White evangelicals as an entire bloc – regardless of how often they report going to church – have been a reliable support group for Bush since he first set foot in the Oval Office.

When the Progressives Left the Republican Party

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

It was on this day in 1912 that Teddy Roosevelt was nominated by the Progressive Party to run for President, an election that went on to define the Republican Party for the rest of the 20th Century.

Republicans had dominated politics ever since the Civil War. A Republican had been in the White House for 44 of the previous 52 years. They were the party of civil rights and, under the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican Party became the party of environmental conservation, antitrust laws, and consumer protection.

Teddy Roosevelt was one of the most popular presidents in history, the youngest too. He was 42 when he took office. He was the first president to ride in an automobile and in an airplane, and the first to visit a foreign country while in office. He was a naturalist. He was an author of history. He published almost 50 books (books by this author).

After he’d served two terms, he announced that he would not seek a third term. He handpicked his successor, William Howard Taft, and then went off on an African safari. But when he got back, Teddy Roosevelt found that Taft had moved away from progressive principles and aligned himself with the conservative wing of the Republican Party.

Teddy Roosevelt ran against Taft in the primaries, won the primary in Taft’s home state of Ohio, but eventually it was party insiders who picked the nominee, and they gave it to Taft. And so Roosevelt called for the creation of a new progressive party and accepted its nomination on this day in 1912. It was nicknamed the Bull Moose Party because Roosevelt said, “I am as strong as a bull moose, and you can use me to the limit.”

He was in a three-way race with Taft and Woodrow Wilson, campaigning on a platform that called for income taxes, inheritance taxes, the eight-hour workday, and voting rights for women. He drew huge crowds wherever he went. In Milwaukee, October 14, 1912, on the way to give his speech, he was shot by a man six feet away, the bullet deflected by the speech in his pocket, along with a metal eyeglasses case. Roosevelt went on to give the speech, but Woodrow Wilson won the election. Despite Roosevelt making the best showing of any third party candidate in American history. He came in second.

And one of the results of his Progressive Party campaign was splitting the Republican Party between conservatives and progressives, and the progressives have never been in charge since.

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/programs/2007/08/06/#tuesday

It was on this day in 1974 that Richard M. Nixon resigned the office of the presidency, the first American president in history to do so. His policies as president had been rather liberal. He began arms control agreements with the Soviet Union. He eased relations with China. He established the Environmental Protection Agency, expanded Social Security and state welfare programs and tried to create a national health insurance system.

Missing: 110,000 AK-47s and 80,000 pistols — oops!

Weapons Given to Iraq Are Missing – washingtonpost.com
GAO Estimates 30% of Arms Are Unaccounted For
By Glenn Kessler, Washington Post Staff Writer

The Pentagon has lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, according to a new government report, raising fears that some of those weapons have fallen into the hands of insurgents fighting U.S. forces in Iraq.

The author of the report from the Government Accountability Office says U.S. military officials do not know what happened to 30 percent of the weapons the United States distributed to Iraqi forces from 2004 through early this year as part of an effort to train and equip the troops. The highest previous estimate of unaccounted-for weapons was 14,000, in a report issued last year by the inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. [mjh: So the real number is 13 times as many as guessed before last Fall’s election. Oh, well.]

The Pentagon did not dispute the GAO findings, saying it has launched its own investigation and indicating it is working to improve tracking. Although controls have been tightened since 2005, the inability of the United States to track weapons with tools such as serial numbers makes it nearly impossible for the U.S. military to know whether it is battling an enemy equipped by American taxpayers. …

[T]he Bush administration frequently complains that Iran and Syria are supplying insurgents but has paid little attention to whether U.S. military errors inadvertently play a role. “We know there is seepage and very little is being done to address the problem,” she said. …

In an unusual move, the train-and-equip program for Iraqi forces is being managed by the Pentagon. Normally, the traditional security assistance programs are operated by the State Department, the GAO reported. The Defense Department said this change permitted greater flexibility, but as of last month it was unable to tell the GAO what accountability procedures, if any, apply to arms distributed to Iraqi forces, the report said. …

Much of the equipment provided to Iraqi troops, including the AK-47s, originates from countries in the former Soviet bloc. In a report last year, Amnesty International said that in 2004 and 2005 more than 350,000 AK-47 rifles and similar weapons were taken out of Bosnia and Serbia, for use in Iraq, by private contractors working for the Pentagon and with the approval of NATO and European security forces in Bosnia.

The Confederacy of Dunces

Democrats Targeted In GOP Debate – washingtonpost.com, By Michael D. Shear, Washington Post Staff Writer

DES MOINES, Aug. 5 — The Republican candidates for president used a nationally televised morning debate to mock Democrats on foreign policy, taxes and health care while sparring with each other over abortion and the administration’s anti-terrorism efforts.

From a stage in Iowa, the state where the nation’s first voting will begin in five months, the GOP candidates said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that their Democratic rivals support plans for “socialized” medicine and predicted that taxes would be raised if a Democrat returns to the White House. …

Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani sparked loud applause when he declared that “the knee-jerk liberal Democratic reaction — raise taxes to get money — very often is a very big mistake.” …

“We are winning. We must win. And we will not set a date for surrender, as the Democrats want us to do,” McCain said.

Echoing him, Giuliani said: “The reality is that you do not achieve peace through weakness and appeasement. . . . We should seek a victory in Iraq and in Baghdad, and we should define the victory.”

The lone voice in continued opposition to the war, Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.), was again outspoken about America’s involvement. …

A new Washington Post poll of voters in Iowa indicates that the Republican race remains muddled. Romney is leading the race here but his support remains soft. Only 19 percent of Republicans likely to vote in the state’s caucuses say they are very satisfied with their choices. …

Rep. Tom Tancredo (Colo.) defended his recent comments that he would deter terrorist attacks by threatening to bomb Mecca and Medina, two important holy cities in Islam.

“The State Department called that ‘reprehensible’ and ‘absolutely crazy,’ ” Stephanopoulos said.

“Yes,” Tancredo answered. “The State Department — boy, when they start complaining about things I say, I feel a lot better about the things I say, I’ll tell you right now.” [mjh: Yup, when competent professionals say I’m crazy, I feel validated.]