Spider-Man

I just saw Spider-Man 3 yesterday. What amazing eye-candy it was. To bad there wasn't an equal amount of brain candy.

The CGI was just jaw-dropping. The animated people looked like real people. The fx blend in to real shots seamlessly. The speed and power of the characters really comes to life.

What does not, unfortunately, is the story. I had praised the first two Spider-Man movies for taking the best of the comic book story lines and using them to great effect in the films. The modern twist on the great 60's Stan Lee plots were fantastic - literally.

But where Lee was a master story teller and a genius at character, the stories that were the springboard for SM3 just didn't cut it. The baseline story - that of the black costume and symbiont - was not a Stan Lee creation. It was a story that preceded the great McFarland run in the 1990's, but wasn't even a product of McFarland overrated writing abilities (though he is a truly great artist).

Essentially, the black slug thing falls from outer space a few feet away from Peter Parker, who fails to notice it. It latches on to him when he makes some terribly selfish life choices, and makes him into a marginally bad guy for a while - an emotional super-villain.

Then he gets rid of it and it turns Eric Foreman into a total monster, Venom. Venom teams up with a misunderstood Sandman to have a totally big fight against Spider-Man. But the Green Goblin forgives Spidey in tome to come and help him out.

Which makes you wonder at just how misunderstood Sandman really was if he was capable of teaming up with an obvious wannabe mass murderer like Venom.

Does any of this sound like a story?

My advise is to go buy a ticket, sit back and suck in the visuals, and just sleep though the parts where people become all mopey.

Teacher

It occurs to me that Georgie is not a lawyer - not that there's anything wrong with that. He's a spoiled rich kid who partied through his undergrad at Yale and his MBA at Harvard, riding his family name like a bullet train to the easy life.

And even though Poppy was a government man - and president - he was, by all accounts, a Mamma's boy. You can be sure that he never sat up late at night talking policy with old Poppy.

His name allowed him to fail upward in business, one sweetheart deal after the next propelling him to the least powerful governorship in the US - Texas. In the Texas state house, his pals were people like A. Gonzo and H. Miers, people who thought he was just grand. And people who worked a political machine the way Georgie used to work beer shooters.

And the Judges were elected - so "Judge" Gonzo remained a yes-man and political fixer, despite his title. It was not in his experience to put anything above Party and Power - which made him the perfect clay dummy for Karl Rove.

Here's what I'm getting at: Georgie never met the Constitution. He never studied it, he never served it until he stole it in 2000. And clearly, he expected the grand old document to do more serving than being served.

From the time he first he ran in 2000 to today, who taught him constitutional law? We've heard about his intimate coaching sessions by out-of-touch cold warrior Condo Rice, but never about any study on the mechanisms of the actual document he's twice sworn to protect, uphold, and defend.

You get the feeling that he was told by the likes of Cheney and Rove and Rummy to do whatever self-serving bloody greed-head know-nothing thing he wanted - and they wanted.

Basically, the guy doesn't get it because he's never gotten it. He doesn't have a percent of the intellectual curiosity to ask the right questions and discover the truth on his own. He doesn't consult with Poppy - who has a clue about these things.

He gets his knowledge of the constitutional role of the president from a guy like Cheney, who thinks the Vice President has a unique and powerful role in government. It's true - because the executive branch Veep breaks ties in the legislative branch Senate, Cheney has claimed extra-constitutional powers. Like the power to get away with shooting old men in the face and then having them apologize to you.

That's power.

One thing the Founding Fathers did not expect was that such a complete ignoramus would - or could - become president. And further, that powerful monied interests would have such a direct hand in telling him his job. Georgie does what he's told because that's all he knows to do. He doesn't have a single original notion about his role because he's doing everything as it's been explained to him.

Even freshman in Congress get tutored on their role and Constitutional responsibilities. For the president, unless there is an understanding to begin with, it's all up to the advisers.

If the new president is a man like Bill Clinton, his own intellectual power and curiosity and need to do the right things will lead to a proper understanding of the job.

Reagan was different from Bush only in that the Neocon reptiles in his administration hadn't yet completely formed their bloody ideology. Men like Jim Baker - who did enough damage with their narrow-minded conservatism - mitigated, as did a Democratic Congress that understood its role.

Bush was completely in the hands of his handlers - a cold blooded bunch of ideological war profiteers who wanted nothing but to win at all costs.

You can't govern like that; you only bring ruin and chaos. So here we are.

Rove

Back to the simple questions of the day.

First, based on sworn testimony by former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, Georgie broke the law in 2004 (at the very least). He continued the illegal NSA wiretapping program without the approval of the Justice Department saying it was legal (clearly fraudulent but at least minimally reviewed). They said that they reviewed it and in their authoritarian president-can-do-no-wrong minds, it was okay. But the program went ahead without even that internal rubber-stamp.

Simple question: where's the Special Prosecutor?

Second simple question: what's Karl Rove doing?

Georgie doesn't have any more elections to defraud. Nobody else in the White House is ever going to run for anything but their lives when the FBI swears out warrants in a few months. Rove is clearly nothing but a smoothly amoral political fixer. So what's he still doing at Georgie's side?

Does the Toddler Prince really need his hand held now? My expectation has been that Rove would pick his next Fool King to 'make,' and then hop off to the primary campaigns to start smearing the other Repubs.

So what happened? I think there are two things going on with Darth Rove.

First, the Rebub field is really truly hopeless. I have never seen a more pathetic presidential group - and that's not just because I think their ideology is utterly fascistic and against everything America should stand for.

Rudi is the frontrunner, but his whole political career revolves around two days when he walked in the rubble of 9-11. But even then, he failed his rescue workers by not fixing the Police-Fire communications when he had a chance. He certified that the area was safe to work in, but it never was. So thousands (yes thousands) of 9-11 clean-up workers are gravely ill with respiratory problems.

And he cashed in on the whole thing with his secretive "Giuliani Partners" consulting firm before he even left office, and has made tens of millions of dollars.

That's just for starters; he's pro-choice (but willing to see abortion sent back to the butchers for votes). He's for gay rights and gun control. Any Repub who has voted for "family values" in the past - which the Repubs have claimed to be their edge at the polls - will reject him.

And yet he's pro-torture and endless war and regal presidential powers. And that's it. That makes him the front-runner. It's pathetic, even for the Repubs.

McCain has become a cartoon of himself. He's another delusional war-monger, who has cuddled up to the far right - but too little, too late. They don't trust him, ironically, because of the "straight talk" that made him a media darling in 2000. And after his Iraq capades, he's become a joke. He should have just stayed in the Senate as a war hero.

Romney is a Mormon, and the Repub base can't forgive that. Plus he's repudiated his former liberal social positions, which makes him a flip-flopper. Repubs, you may recall, hate flip-floppers.

Brownback and Tancredo and Huckelby are a collective joke - who don't believe in evolution. Try selling that to anybody outside the warped extreme religious right. Poor Fred Thompson has incurable cancer - I wish for his sake he'd just take care of himself and enjoy the rest of his life. As a practical matter, a man with incurable cancer cannot win a presidential election - sorry.

So there are no good options for Rove. There's nobody even close enough to try and re-invent. McCain is the only remote possibility, but after Rove hit far below the belt against him in 2000, I can't imagine even this version of McCain taking him on.

The other reason for Rove continuing malevolent presence in our executive branch is protection. As an official of the Junta, Rove has the muscle to refuse a Senate subpoena. He can hide behind Georgie and Cheney's skirts until the mess blows over in 2009. As a private citizen, Bill Gates couldn't afford the lawyers he'd need.

His reign of greed and lawbreaking has twisted the American government into contortions that will take a generation to untie. He has crossed every ethical and legal line to try and start a Repub Caliphate in Washington. He's brought death and ruin to everything he's looked at. He is a living pestilence.

And the minute he steps out of the Washington vault he's built for himself, he's meat.

So he'll stay in the shadows - or try. With any luck (or true Americans making it happen) there will be investigations and prosecutions of this cancer, and the other cancers he's installed in positions of power.

We'll start with AG Gonzo, and go from there.

Not Going!

I don't care what you say, or all you ethics panel dudes or all you bank managers and countries and the rest of you - Paul Wolfowitz will stand tall and keep his job! What's his real crime here? He gave his girlfriend a new job with a big huge raise. You know what that means?

He was thinking with his dick.

And who among us can claim that they haven't been led by their genitalia at some point in their lives? That includes you, too, ladies. So what if Wolfowitz lied to the American public and pushed his country into a bloody war for what he knew were false reasons? He got results. And now he's bringing the same 'can-do' attitude to the effete global-ist World Bank.

That's the real problem: all those foreigners at the bank are ruining it for real Americans. Real Americans know that there is no such thing as 'oversight.' Wolfie was at the DoD for years, started a war, hell, he could have gone on a three-state killing spree without oversight. Congress was, appropriately, in a dead coma. And that's where they should stay.

So don't show up at Paul's World Bank and start issuing reports with 'facts' and 'policies.' Those things aren't supposed to count for anything. They haven't in the US. It's the fault of those Euro defeat-o-crats - not Paul.

Paul Wolfowitz was born blameless and will die blameless - and will blame you for his eventual demise.

Citing what it said was the “central theme” of the matter, the report said Mr. Wolfowitz’s assertions that what he did was in response to the requests of others showed that “from the outset” of his tenure he “cast himself in opposition to the established rules of the institution.”

“He did not accept the bank’s policy on conflict of interest, so he sought to negotiate for himself a resolution different from that which would be applied to the staff he was selected to head,” the committee said, adding that this was “a manifestation of an attitude in which Mr. Wolfowitz saw himself as the outsider to whom the established rules and standards did not apply.”

“It evidences questionable judgment and a preoccupation with self-interest over institutional best interest,” it said.

What these policy fascists fail to realize is that there are different rules for Neocons than for the rest of us - don't hate the player, hate the game! You can't blame Paulie for taking advantage of the life-excuse of being an extreme rightist ideologue. It's his bank! Rules don't apply to him!

See: when you're a Neocon, your are Right. And when you are, by dint of your extreme ideology, Always Right, than everything you do is, by definition, The Right Thing to Do. That's what Paul and his Peeps are trying to explain - it's like Georgie in the White House. Georgie is the Commander Guy - and he's always right. Just by saying something, he makes it the right thing to say.

So, of course, the Junta has been mobilized in support of the Right Man:

In the face of that storm, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. was on the telephone during the day with counterparts in at least half a dozen countries to tell them that “these facts do not rise to the level of warranting dismissal,” according to a senior Treasury official.

Of course they do not rise to the level of dismissal! Think back to Rummy and the city-sized crater of destruction he caused - and lasted five years as SoD.

I mean - losing Wolfie over this would be like impeaching a sitting president for some legal dalliance with a woman. Absurd!

Oh, sure, if you want to go back in history you can find cases where leaders had to behave good or else the appearance of impropriety would cause them to resign. But remember: those weaklings weren't Right. They weren't Neocons. The Neocon's purpose on the planet is to get lots and lots of power so they can screw things up on a global and historical scale.

Without his World Bank, how can Paulie make the kind of bad decisions that will cause chaos, death, and ruin? Exactly.

But there are good outcomes from this scandal already. For example, the Euro's might not pony up their end of the Cash crippling the Bank:

But European governments have increasingly signaled that they will not finance the bank if Mr. Wolfowitz stays. In particular jeopardy is a commitment made in 2005 by Mr. Bush and other Western leaders to cancel the debts of poor countries, a pledge that will cost $30 billion in new financing over the next three years.

Keeping poor people poor is Job One for Neocons, so Paulie is making a Neocon success of the bank after all! Think of it - as a Neocon, Paulie can't help but succeed. Here's how it works:

1) Neocon gets power in an organization he hates (UN, World Bank, United States government).

2) Using his thorough and complete amorality, coupled with cave-man ignorance and an inability to do anything right, the Neocon destroys everything he touches.

3) The hated organization is toppled.

Hail to the Neocons! It's time to fail up, up, and away!

But, even better, this fell in Paulie's lap - literally. His girl was going to sue the World Bank because of Paulie, so he gave her the State Department job to shut her up, and then hushed up the whole thing.

Yes, thinking with his dick has led Paulie to nearly destroy the World Bank.

How many other dicks can make that claim?

Gas

Georgie's going to give a gas speech, and talk about reducing US dependence on foreign oil by 20% in 10 years. Right. You know what that means: more switch grass.

You know switch grass - the stuff that can be cooked into some sort of bio-fuel. Something;'s got to give, that's for sure, but for Georgie, this has always been one of his favorite empty talking points. He's brought it up in the State of the Union lie-a-thon, and on the campaign trail. He must be really hurting these days to drag it out again.

As the biggest Repub denier around, he claims to not believe in anything that's not utterly devastating for the country. So that includes lowering emissions and raising gas mileage standards. Can't do those things. Sure, they'll eventually lead to the kind of technology breakthroughs that will keep the planet habitable, but that's not what he's here for.

He's here to win elections and be the Commander Guy. He's here to lead his party to victory - no matter what. Wreck the Justice Department? No prob. See, the Department of Justice is far less important than the success of the Repub party. The party must thrive. That's all there is.

That means keeping all the juicy auto maker donations rolling in. That means keeping Detroit happy. And nothing makes them happier than whiting out all the federal standards for eight years.

So look for the most utterly inefficacious energy plan you can possibly image. And remember: it's not the fault of the auto makers or the energy companies. It's YOUR fault.

Out of Iraq

There's all sorts of commotion going on in Washington these days. It seems like, with the Democrats in charge of Congress again, some Repubs are mucking out the back of their closets and digging out the garage to find a copy of the constitution. That would be the pre-Rove constitution, the one that has Congressional oversight in it.

A bunch of "moderate" Repub congressmen wen to see Georgie yesterday, and told him - to his face! - that the Iraq war is sinking the party and they won't hold the line with him forever. Whew! Talking reality to a deranged personality like Georgie can be tricky business.

Here's how it went:

Participants in Tuesday's White House meeting said frustration about the Iraqi government's efforts dominated the conversation, with one pleading with the president to stop the Iraqi parliament from going on vacation while "our sons and daughters spill their blood." The House members pressed Bush and Gates hard for a "Plan B" if the current troop increase fails to quell the violence and push along political reconciliation. Davis said that administration officials convinced him there are contingency plans, but that the president declined to offer details, saying that if he announced his backup plan, the world would shift its focus to that contingency, leaving the current strategy no time to succeed.

Tough stuff! "Pleading" and "pressing" are things you just don't do to the First Frat Boy. And asking for a Plan B? That's like asking him to resign in disgrace. You know, not right now.

Because the mysterious Plan B, which has not been mentioned before, is such a corker that if anyone was told about it, it's what they'd want for sure. You'd think a Plan B that good would somehow morph into Plan A, because the current Plan A, frankly, sucks.

And then there's a bunch of talk about what the Dems are going to do about the war funding bill, and how the Repubs will react to which plan. It's all very telling of the Washington culture; around 57% of the public wants to get out of the useless blood war, right effing now. Only a fifth of the public thinks anything is going right, and that's the fifth that thought the Great Depression was "spiffy."

And so they fiddle in Washington while Baghdad burns. As the Repubs just old Georgie so rudely, he and the congress are politicking while "our sons and daughters spill their blood."

As the great Glenn Greenwald pointed out yesterday when discussing the far-right's elimination of habeas corpus (and the Dems sad acquiescence to it), there is no time to waste, and there is no room for politics. It's a fundamental bedrock principle that the nation was founded on.

It is, as is the war funding, bigger than party. It's what the US was originally designed for. Look: the Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, understood that fanatical extremist bloodthirsty totalitarians could cheat enough to in elections over the course of time. That's why they built in effective checks and balances, and a free press.

Well, the free press thing is broken worse than the government itself. The authoritarians have taken over government and embedded their spore in every department. But the Congress managed to free itself, and it must act.

Habeas corpus? No brainer - stand up for your country and vote. Stop a bloody and purposeless war? Just do it.

Baghdad

So we're into our "surge." Can you tell how well it's going? Troops have had their tours extended. Most of the extra brigades are in place. And people are still getting killed at a rate that makes Charles Manson look like Charlie Brown. Victory must be just around the corner, right?

But don't think that this "surge" is in any way surge-y. A "surge" is:

1. a strong, wavelike, forward movement, rush, or sweep: the onward surge of an angry mob.
2. a strong, swelling, wavelike volume or body of something: a billowing surge of smoke.

This is not a "rush or sweep." Those forces are there to stay. They've planned to keep them there until at least 2008. And is there any question of the Junta pulling them out after that? Not if it's up to them.

So the "let's wait three months to see if it's working - it's just three months, for crying out loud" crowd is now up to "let's wait until September." Apparently, vacation season is going to cut into their surge evaluation time.

And what do you think we'll hear in September? Every major political blog has already written the script - the generals claiming some success but looking for more improvement, summing up that "it's working as well as we could expect." Except that we used to expect that our military leaders would tell us the truth. We used to expect that in a democracy we'd have all thin information that the government has.

Okay, stop laughing. We all know that the Junta only tell lies. What's really dangerous is that they've taught the military to lie:

The U.S. military commands that oversee Baghdad and Iraq as a whole have so far failed to meet requests to release current statistics on attack trends, with some U.S. officers voicing concern that the information would be skewed by critics to argue that the strategy is not working.

What could be more dangerous than a military that manipulates information? We've gone from the slow boat to hell to the fast cigarette boat to a Pakistani-type military dictatorship. We are already blessed with secret detention, unchecked surveillance, and lots of good old fashioned torture.

So why not put a general in charge? Our current Junta is led by a cabal of chickenhawks - why not put the real hawks in power? At least real hawks would be somewhat effective in making the trains run on time. When they do something, maybe it will get done. Like, when they buy hundreds of trailer homes for people in Louisiana, they won't park them in Arizona.

We could use a touch of efficiency. And sure, they'd control everyone's lives and throw dissenters in jail, but that's a small price to pay for a drop of efficiency, isn't it? I mean, compared to being ruled by the capricious whims of two-digit-IQ doorknobs like Georgie Bush and Karl Rove, we could get some dudes with combat experience. Hell, I'd settle for the guys who can build a bridge in an hour.

So Army: you go ahead and withhold those reports. We don't need them. And stay in Iraq as long as you like - it will "sharpen your sword" and train up a good cabal of battle-tested guys to come back and abolish the constitution.

Just do it before the Repubs - please!

Creation

This is fantastic: three of the ten Repub presidential candidrones don't believe in evolution. And now the right wing is 'debating' what to do with the whole idea. Splendid - what a great way to reveal how little they've changed over the years and how closely they resemble their simian ancestors - some creatures evolve faster than others.

Not believing in evolution is like not believing in electricity. It's been a long time sine it was an actual 'debate.' And the electricity folks can be pretty sure that their side won.

And, incidentally, there is absolutely nothing in science - even the science of evolution - that needs to contradict religion. Evolution works like any other scientific process, but where does science come from? The universe obeys certain physical laws - who made those laws? And why is it considered so counter-religious to explore the wonderful universe that the deity brought us into?

I saw Carl Sagan years ago on Carson, and he answered the question perfectly: if science is so wrong, why is G-d playing such a huge hoax on us? Why did G-d give us minds to think and understand and question - and then punish us for using these faculties? Why did He put galaxies out there where we can see them - only to tell us to stop doing the math and just go to church?

Obviously, it's an absurdity perpetrated by those who could not pass math in school (I got a D). And by those who use religion as a cudgel to win power and money from the opiated masses.

And, politically, people are starting to understand what the Ignorant Right has done to them. We've lost most of a decade of stem cell research. People who would have been helped will get their cure - whenever it's developed - eight years late. Do you think they've all got an extra eight years?

Anti-science has brought pollution and global warming. It's brought a religious FDA that withholds birth control and allows Big Pharma to sell whatever toxic crap they feel like cramming into a pill.

Justice is now a political operation.

Nobody outside the far right ever wanted any of this. I just hope the backlash will fit the crimes.

Meanwhile,the press - even the New York Times - still take these war-mongering special-ed cases seriously. There's a huge article this morning discussing the conservative take on evolution. Apparently, there's some sort of 'split.'

But anybody who can take any of this stuff seriously is far too delusional to lead anything bigger than a FotoLab booth. What do 'conservatives' believe about evolution? Who cares?

Conservatism is the corpse that continues to twitch - we just have to make sure it's not going to come back as a zombie.

The other wonderful thing that this debate among Neanderthals shows is the fact that conservatives don't actually believe in anything other than obedience to authority. All the so-called principles that they talk about have been trashed by this Junta. I won't go over the list, but in everything from social policy to economic policy to foreign policy, conservative principles have been forgotten in a stampede to spend and render and kill. There's nothing left of them.

So here's to the great conservative debate - keep it up, boys! No, Senator Brownback, you did not come from a monkey, sir! Here, say it into this microphone...

Fade - Updated

You read it here first - the Dems backed down and apparently have agreed to pass a war funding bill without withdrawal timelines. Bush compromised by not physically urinating on Democrats, and instead allowing Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to wash his car.

Seriously: what is going on here? Harry and Nancy bucked fast on that one. Why? They have the American, you know, people on their side. Their only negatives in the polls have to do with not standing up to the Junta enough - so they decide to stand up less.

I have a suggestion for them: stop talking to Georgie. Stop meeting with him or anyone in his gang of vampires. Do not, under any circumstances, "negotiate." To negotiate with Georgie mean listening to him endlessly whine, posture, and be the Decider - and then get his way. That's how it works.

Instead, talk to Repubs. You know - the guys who will face voters again in a couple of years. They know that even in their backward Red domains, people have turned against the war and this hopelessly corrupt administration.

I'll bet Nancy and Harry can put together a bill that will attract enough Repubs to over-ride a veto. And if not, they can really hammer these idiots back home - and take their seats away in 2008 (they'll do that anyway, but still).

But with the political climate changing so quickly and so drastically, Nancy & Harry need to keep up - or get passed by. Georgie and his authoritarian party are bobbing on the 25% support of the fanatical fascistic Repub base (and the super rich who just love their tax cuts). The rest of the country is fluctuating between wanting to kill them and just wanting to jail them for life.

That being said, I still have faith in Nancy & Harry. I'm really hoping they're using this second bill to set up an even bigger score that will happen soon (can't be soon enough). There is more and more deliberate malfeasance being uncovered every day - and I'm sure no shortage of supply for years to come.

This bill is neither the beginning nor the end of opposition to the mis-rule of the worst president in American history. But it's an important one. Every day that the war is allowed to needlessly continue, more people die. Their lives are worth more than the political expediency of the eviscerating narcissistic Right.

Update:

Not true! Even though the Washington Post has it on their front page, Pelosi and Reid are denying the story. Pelosi just went in front of her caucus and told them it's just not true. And since the negotiations haven't started yet, it's hard to believe they've actually made any concessions.

Talk about a dysfunctional media. Now the WaPo is negotiating for Georgie and capitulatring for Nancy?

Blow Up

The drama is being played out in Washington as though it's been scripted. The "Decider" (now the "Commander Guy") has vetoed the "emergency" war funding bill (that's a lot of needless quotation marks - I hope I don't burn through them too quickly and run out), and the Democrats don't have the votes to override the veto.

Georgie is blaming the Congress for not funding the troops, and the Congress is blaming Georgie for getting a lot of the troops killed for nothing. And a thousand times more Iraqis. Oh, and unaccountably wasting billions of dollars. And squandering our position of world leadership. Plus, the Democrats are funding the troops - all the way back home.

So, where do we go from here? Who wins the stare-down? On the one side, you have the squinty-eyed Veep who looks more like a cartoon villain every day. You have the grey-haired toddler of a Commander Guy. And you have a collection of sycophants and jack-booted thugs who proudly believe that Georgie the toddler is actually King Georgie the Toddler.

But Georgie doesn't have to face the voters ever again (especially not without an armed guard). He's dreadfully unpopular, and approaching "broadly hated" status, but doesn't care. He's got drastically un-American advisers telling him that he's royalty - above the law. And in his profound ignorance, he believes them.

On the other hand, you have Congress. The Democrats hold a decent majority in the House, but just a one-vote margin in the Senate. As more Senate seats come up for election, Democrats will win more. Doesn't matter where or in what state - that's just the way it is now.

Congress has the will of the people behind them - backed up by actual opinion polls, rather than the Repub "wishful thinking" polls they seem to rely on.

But who will win? I suspect the Democrats will cave, but only partially. They'll make the Iraqi withdrawal language weak and unenforceable, and Georgie will finally sign something. This won't please anybody on the right or the left.

The two alternatives I like are: 1) stick to your guns. If Georgie won't sign the money, he's the one killing the troops (that's true no matter what). That way, the Democrats stand up for right and can win something important.

The other avenue, which I believe Rep. Murtha proposed, is to give the money in short intervals, no strings. So the troops will be funded to stay (rather than funded to leave) for three month shots. When the votes are there, a tougher bill can be passed.

But no matter what, more Americans and Iraqis will die needlessly for the political crimes of one man and the movement that worships him.