UPDATE: Disappearing Nuclear Stuff
As I wrote earlier, I was incredulous as the US forces in Iraq being so incompetent regarding securing nuclear materials that the IAEA had identified during inspections. It seems thatI was wrong and the leadership was just that incompetent. When I say leadership I am talking about Defense Secretary "No Additional Troops" Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration. The IAEA has indicated that 380 tons of a VERY high power explosive was removed from bunkers in Iraq after the invasion. Just how bad is this information?

From the NY Times article:

"The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the same type of material, and larger amounts were apparently used in the bombing of a housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the blasts in a Moscow apartment complex in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people."

Damn this makes me so mad. I wonder how many of those bombs that kill our guys, the Iraqi police and national guard, and the bystander Iraqis contain this stuff. To make matters worse it appears that the US Administration in Iraq was attempting to keep this information hidden from the public.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo is all over this issue (read his previous posts also), so I defer to him.

- posted by Samuel @ 9:49 AM

 
The increasingly trendy position statement
It seems to have now become trendy to state your vote before going into the polling place on November 2nd. Instapundit and E Volokh, Drezner, Yglesias, Armed Liberal to name a few have all stated their positions (more or less). Since I want to avoid the fate promised by Brad Delong (a good blog to including in your reading) and wouldn't mind being trendy for once...

I'll be pulling the lever, pushing the button, punching the chad, or using a No. 2 pencil to vote for Kerry.

Those who know me most probably are not suprised. I am and always have been a registered Democrat. I grew up on a farm, raised by teachers, and have become a college professor at a northern private college. So, as Popeye would say, "I 'am what I 'am".

This election has been far harder on me than most. Mainly because I have lived in the Republican dominated eastern third of Tennessee, whereas I now live in the swinging state of Pennsylvania. Almost all of the time my vote amounted to nothing more than an affirmation of my views since my candidates had little chance in winning (Phil Bredesen being an exception.) The most distressing thing to me in these elections was how weak the Democratic syndicates usually were and how their opponents defeated them so handily. I blame the local party for this weakness and if any should read this blog they are hereby given notice: I will return one day to the land of my birth and I will do what I can to drive that weakness into the darkness where it belongs. The correlation between the weak E. Tennessee Dems and Kerry are obvious. I have never thought he was the best candidate, in fact I voted in the primary for John Edwards. He is the only candidate I have viewed in person (there might have been 50 people in the room) and what I heard really resonated with me. Now in all honesty I must say that the Edwards I saw then has been missing for most of the post Dean Machine meltdown.

Instapundit comments in the Gaurdian about the Scots-Irish Jacksonian traits in the South. I am not sure where Reynolds hails from but I know where I do and I am the above (mitigated with a bit of Jeffersonian and Wilsonian views). When 9/11 happened I had to control the white hot rage inside, mostly because if it was to be wielded I needed to use it for the right reasons. I supported the War on Terror. I was for a more aggressive Afghanistan campaign than we employed, and as a result I am VERY bitter about Osama and Tora Bora. I even supported the Iraq invasion, because I thought that kicking the crap out of bad guys was what the good America did and Saddam was the easily on my short list of bad guys. I wanted the US to liberate the Iraqis, provide them with enough stability to let them form a functional democracy of their own choosing. However, as Drezner put it, the cluster***ks really piss me off. To that end I cannot count on the Bush Administration to correct their mistakes, mostly because they don't see them. And all thats just on the war, my main issues are energy and the environment and I feel that Bush and company had done little more than crap on what worked in favor of returning to a Regan era view on regulation (less = better and companies that are unburdened with regulation will never be bad and cheat.)

I could go into a litany of things that are wrong with both sides, however I'll just exit this post by pointing to an article in the The Nation magazine's online edition. The Nation has been rather weak in recent years but this article , or rather a blog like listing of other articles was quite good. Take each point with a grain of salt and consider the source, but if only a few of the 100 points is true then Bush and company need to go.



- posted by Samuel @ 2:09 AM