licentious radio

Thursday, April 3, 2003
[5:36:53 PM]

Cook the books! Cook the books!

My parrot is at it again. He saw this report where the Federal deficit for 2002 is $158 billion, but Greenspan says if you didn't use Harken/Enron/WorldCom/Andersen-style, the deficit would be $365 billion.

My parrot's screaming "Cook the books. Cook the books!".

Meanwhile the White House is saying it give "aid and comfort to the enemy" to complain about Republican fraud in time of war.

[1:36:58 PM]
The news from Nasiriya is that a lot of Marines were pulled out, and now there is violent chaos, and murderous thievery in the streets. (See previous post -- below.)

The dead guy who used to own a pickup truck is another poster child for Rummy's warplan. When you conquer a nation, you become responsible for keeping the peace. Rummy didn't let the generals bring in enough troops to do the job. Those marines are needed in Baghdad. The dead guy won't miss his pickup truck, but his family and friends will miss *him*.

The Rumsfeld clique has been spinning madly about their strategic debacle. A quick push to Baghdad is *not* evidence that the strategy was OK. A sudden end to open warfare would *not* be evidence that the strategy was OK.

The issue over the weekend was that the US forces had to wait for supplies to catch up with them, because the supply lines were not secure. Rumsfeld's plans didn't initially secure the supply lines. *That's* the first failure, for which Jessica Lynch is the poster child -- thankfully, a *living* poster child.

When the rush-for-Baghdad collapsed, Myers and Franks and Rumsfeld quickly, loudly shouted that the plan hasn't changed. Well, what changed was that they had to send a division to Najaf, and half a division to Nasiriya. The soldiers themselves were part of the plan, of course, but if the *plan* had been for them to secure Nasiriya, they would have been there before Jessica Lynch and her fellows got shot up. Who would make a plan like: "first we let them kill a few dozen marines, *then* we secure the area."

The Dim-Bulb-in-Chief might let Myers keep his job for this, but Karl Rove is likely to do some knifing, even if the victory parties get started next week. Maybe they can make Myers a hero? It worked for Powell, after all.

[1:15:58 PM]
Reporters' Log: War in Iraq [bbc.co.uk].

Examples:

Kuwait :: Ryan Dilley :: 1842GMT

An aid worker who has been into Iraq to assess what relief supplies are needed in the war torn country has told me the humanitarian effort in the area around Umm Qasr is a "shambles".

Patrick Nicholson of the UK charity Cafod has just returned from the port town and said the town is not under control. He described it like the Wild West.

Baghdad :: Paul Wood :: 1817GMT

We have seen over the past hour repeated flashes in the sky on the edge of Baghdad.

There have been more air strikes, three large explosions shaking the ground beneath our feet.

Nassiriya :: Andrew North :: 1645GMT

The security situation in Nassiriya has deteriorated markedly since the removal over the past twenty four hours of many of the marines involved in the original fighting to take the city.

So there was no one to stop at least twenty armed men who descended on the main hospital this morning. They threatened staff before making off with equipment including computers and televisions and set light to hospital vehicles.

Many patients fled in terror straight afterwards.

Commanders have promised they will restore a marine guard at the complex. But even as they spoke, another man was shot dead by men attempting to steal his pick up truck. There are varying reports as to who's behind the violence and the widespread looting.

Whatever the case, this is in effect now a major peace keeping challenge, even before the war is over and one that US forces have to meet as they try to convince Iraqis that they're committed to the country's future.

My comments:

Great potential! I loved a paper called the European when it was full of very short bits of news from street-level, all over Europe. It gives you a perspective on what is actually happening that you can't get if news articles have to be on topics important enough in themselves to justify 2,000 words. Also, most big-time news comes from government sources. This sort of weblog could let reporters put in details from many sources that would be edited out of articles in print media.

They have some learning to do. They want you to link to a redirection url, not the page with the text. Why fight against the nature of the web? Make clean urls.

The reverse chronological order is inappropriate for breaking news. I've done a proof-of-concept that you can use cookies and JavaScript to hide previously-read entries client-side. (Or put a link at the top of the page to the first new item.)

They need to add permanent links to individual entries, of course.

The volume is probably too high. How many reporters can post several times a day to one page without being overwhelming? The way this is usually done is to have a separate url for each person. Even if you have one url with several reporters, you might want archive pages where you can read only one person's reports.

Thanks to DaveNet Dave Winer [userland.com] for the link.

[10:39:23 AM]
"I think he [Arnett] should be brought back and tried as a traitor to the United Sates of American for aiding and abetting the Iraqi government during a war." -- Senator Jim Bunning

Hate-mongering.