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My internet connection is painfully slow tonight so…fuck it. I’m gonna go read a book and get smarter and stuff.
For the curious, I’m finally getting around to reading Imperial Life In The Emerald City. The Bushies sure did a bad job. They should get voted out of office or something.
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Hey, let us know if there’s anything in there about where that missing $12 billion might be, won’t you?
Excellent book, but at this late date, it may not tell you a lot you haven’t read already. The cumulative effect, like any book by David Cay Johnston, will require sedation of some kind. Sad that this is just one more tale of the breathtaking incompetence and blinkered ideology of the Bush catastrophe, only with deadly consequences for millions of people.
It is fascinating to see how the names of so many major and minor players in the fiasco still pop up (viz. Senor, Dan) — there seems to be no nadir of performance low enough to make them go away in wingerland.
A nice dovetail for that book would be Rory Stewart’s Occupational Hazards, or as it’s known in the US, The Prince of the Marshes. It describes his time as the deputy provincial chief for the CPA down in the south of Iraq. (And if you haven’t read The Places In Between, describing his trek across Afghanistan, you should, not least because Stewart — now working at Harvard — isn’t so happy with the idea of SURGE II: Afghan Boogaloo.)
The single best book I read on the Iraq experience. Any chance the CPA had to turn Iraq around was smashed by the use of thousands of Monica Goodlings to run the show.
Amazing the stupidity of bushco. Take an extremely high risk position, then sabotage it by underemployment of troops, and official anarchy in the US colonial government. This book with “Fiasco” by Ricks is a pretty complete picture of ‘Iraq: First Blood’.
I just spent half an hour reading the first few Amazon reviews of this book, and then the comments on the reviews, and the trolls commenting on the comments (”0 out of 14 reviewers believe this is helpful”)… Sold me on the book, though. Thanks, tbogg!
Let me guess. Do you have Time Warner cable for your internet connection. TW San Diego is crap. They’ve had problems since late last year. It’s their DNS servers.
Last time I ran into the problem, googling ran me into some forum where folks suggested using other DNS services:
Open DNS are: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220
Level 3 DNS are: 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2
I switched last night, and though I believe things are slightly slower than when TW was working full-speed, they’re at least consistent.
If you’re on Cox, maybe they’re having the same problem.
That’s a great book. I mean, it’s no revelation that things were fucked up badly in the ‘Raq, but the details are morbidly fascinating in that having-margaritas-on-the-beach-as-the-tsunami-approaches way.
Well, I’m on TW, and I’m guessing TBogg is too – and something definitely happened last night. Loading FDL kept sending me to the TW search/results page – it was having problems resolving the address. Did the full cold reboot thing and had the same problems.
You’re correct, TW is crap. I’ve been checking the U-Verse user forums in SD – I’m this close to making the jump.