From Ballot Access News:

A response that I typed up to a certain miscreant using the handle “qrsi” got a mention by one of the WaPo bloggers!  And to top it off, said miscreant’s offensive posting was removed from the discussion page!

In an age of global warming and increasing energy prices, living in a neighborhood where you can walk to stores or services in an important consideration.

Now there is a website that will calculate how walkable your neighborhood is.  Just type in your address and it will calculate a walk score from zero to a hundred, with a hundred being the best.

Kensington, an older neighborhood that was originally built around a rail line scores a 69 out of 100.  See how your neighborhood compares.

Abdul Bari Atwan was one of a very few Western journalists to interview Osama bin Laden before 9/11, spending three days with him in the mountains of Afghanistan in 1996.

As Atwan relates it, Bin Laden wanted to draw the US into a fight in the Middle East and was disappointed when the Clinton administration withdrew from Somolia.

It seems Osama bin Laden had a long-term strategy. He told me personally that he can’t go and fight the Americans and their country. But if he manages to provoke them and bring them to the Middle East and to their Muslim worlds, where he can find them or fight them on his own turf, he will actually teach them a lesson. It seems the invasion of Iraq fulfilled Osama bin Laden’s wish. That’s why the Americans are losing in Iraq, financially and on a human basis, and even their allies, including Australia, are really losing patience, losing money, losing personnel, losing reputation in that part of the world.

One might ask what sort of a moron falls so easily into this kind of a trap. But then, we all know the answer to that one.

Senior Diplomats Retaking Foreign Policy

Senior career diplomats are retaking control of key elements of U.S. foreign policy and have begun to assert significant influence as the Bush administration enters its waning months eager to salvage a legacy marred by the Iraq war.Since assuming the helm at the State Department in 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has installed veteran foreign service officers with more than 200 years of collective diplomatic experience in seven critical posts from the Middle East to South Asia and the Far East.

By contrast, their immediate predecessors had just 72 years of combined experience and five of them were Republican political operatives with limited or no background in diplomacy, according to an Associated Press survey of senior agency appointees.

What is curious about this article is its implicit criticism of Colin Powell and his top aide, Lawrence Wilkerson. This criticism is implicit because it refers to appointees of Powell’s as having quite limited foreign policy experience as compared to Condoleeza Rice’s appointees. Furthermore, the article implies that Powell’s appointees were more sympathetic to the neocons than Rice’s appointees are. This is damned strange, because Wilkerson has long articulated his opposition to the neocon agenda, while Rice as National Security Advisor implemented the neocons’s agenda. The State Department under Powell has been (for the most part, at least) widely considered to have been recalcitrant towards the neocons’s agenda. Rice, meanwhile, has (again, for the most part) has been seen as Bush II’s agent dispatched to wrest more control over a bureaucracy that is (again, for the most part) seen as hostile (or, at the very least, dubious) to the neocons’s agenda.

Invading Iraq would be a “quagmire.”

Green Party candidate Daniel Brezenoff participated in a four way debate for the special election in California’s 37th Congressional District tp replace Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald that also included the Libertarian candidate.

Brezenoff condemned the Democrats for their continued funding of the Iraq war and neglect of environmental issues.  In addition, hge called for the impeachment of President Bush.

It’s rare when Green Party are allowed in debates at all. It will be interesting to see if this helps Brezenoff at the polls

House Democrats have dropped two proposals that would have required higher mileage standards for new automobiles. The proposals would have raised mileage standards for cars by 27 to 40%.

Nancy Pelosi released a statement that she supported requiring automakers to make more fuel efficient vehicles but that the issue was deferred “in the interest of promoting passage of a consensus energy bill.”

The issue will now be decided in a House-Senate conference committee.