I found this interesting tidbit in an otherwise conventional Time article on the troop increases in Afghanistan:

Obama began his terse statement Tuesday by acknowledging that “there is no more solemn duty as President than the decision to deploy our armed forces into harm’s way.” He has been personally writing letters to the families of each U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, hand signing them “Barack.” Such letters no doubt will become more difficult to write in the months ahead, when the casualties begin to include some of those he ordered into combat.

I thought that was interesting so I looked it up, and found more detail at the Washington Times:

In his first few weeks in office, sometime between celebratory bill signings and phone calls from foreign leaders, President Obama sat in the Oval Office for the most somber task of his presidency – penning letters to families of troops killed in combat.

“This was real, it was personal, it was so important to us,” said Thya Merz, whose son Marine Lance Cpl. Julian Brennan was killed Jan. 24 in Afghanistan.

The letter was signed “Barack,” Ms. Merz told The Washington Times.

“Not ‘president,’ just his first name, and it just felt like, OK, my son has been acknowledged,” she said.

Mr. Obama personalizes each letter, asking staffers to gather details about the service member, such as their hometown and where they were stationed, a White House aide said. The letters are sent to parents and spouses, and sometimes children of the fallen troops.

The president writes the notes by hand, then the letters are typed before he adds his signature.

According to the Washington Times, Bush did something similar (though there isn’t as much detail in that article.) I applaud this. Every President should know something about each soldier who dies in war, so that he can understand the grave toll that war inflicts. But given how the situation is unfolding in Afghanistan, it’s safe to say that many more letters will be written before Obama’s time in office comes to an end.

I think this article pretty well captures the sentiment of people on the left and right about this bailout package. Some combination of fear and anger dominate the public mood at the moment, and rightly so. This crisis appears to the average person to have come from nowhere, and at the same time that people are realizing that their personal livelihoods have been made hostage to rampant profiteering on Wall Street, leaders in Congress and President Bush himself are haranguing us with threats about how dire this crisis is-a crisis they should have seen coming and should have done something about, or what the hell are we sending them up there for-at the same time that economists are telling us that the bailout is either immediately necessary or not really necessary at all. It really should come as no surprise that many people are simply saying to hell with it and are willing to let the whole mess collapse if it’ll drag down the bastards that got us into this mess too. Can you blame them? Right now what this country needs is a big apology from Congress and the President, along the lines of “we know we fucked up and we’re really sorry but please you’ve got to let us fix this and we promise to make sure it never happens again.” I find that humility and shame goes a long way when you’ve fucked up, and that lesson applies just as well to people we elect to higher office.

Today’s Washington Post discusses Bob Woodward’s new book in which it is revealed that the Bush administration has been spying on Iraiq PM Nouri al-Maliki and other Iraqi leaders. To which I say, good idea. But the article also discusses other tidbits from the book, including this exchange with President Bush:

According to Woodward, the president maintained an odd detachment from the reviews of war policy during this period, turning much of the process over to Hadley. “Let’s cut to the chase,” Bush told Woodward, “Hadley drove a lot of this.”

Nor, Woodward reports, did Bush express much urgency for change during the months when sectarian killings and violent attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq began rising, reaching more than 1,400 incidents a week by October 2006 — an average of more than eight an hour. “This is nothing that you hurry,” he told Woodward in one of the interviews, when asked whether he had given his advisers a firm deadline for recommending a revised war strategy.

In response to a question about how the White House settled on a troop surge of five brigades after the military leadership in Washington had reluctantly said it could provide two, Bush said: “Okay, I don’t know this. I’m not in these meetings, you’ll be happy to hear, because I got other things to do.”

I don’t want to oversell this…but seriously. Okay, so maybe he’s not in those strategy meetings, but he didn’t think at some point to ask his advisors at some later point why five and not more, or less? Doesn’t someone wonder about that sort of thing? Or care enough to at least make something up when asked about it?

The Chronicle of Higher Education asked their readers to indulge in flights of fancy and produce their own designs for the forthcoming Bush Presidential Library to be installed at SMU sometime in the all-too-soon future (via Unfair Park.) The results are hilarious. Designs include the “Hole in the Ground” which includes a reflecting pool permitting visitors to see who is ultimately to blame for the Bush Presidency, the “Cruciform Plan” that is fueled directly via a pipeline to Iraq, the “Library and Fun Ranch” that comes complete with the U.S. economy roller coaster and Katrina water park follies, and a giant cube that “floats on fountains!”

Yeah, it was probably a bad idea for the NY Times to hire Bill Kristol as one of their columnists. It’s assumed-rightly-that he’d be a partisan hack. But he also doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Example one? Today’s column wherein he writes this:

After the last two elections, featuring the well-born George Bush and Al Gore and John Kerry, Americans — even Republicans! — are ready for a likable regular guy. Huckabee seems to be that.

Whereas Bush is not. That sounds a little odd. Why is that? Oh, maybe because of columns like this one:

..cops and firefighters are, if the women in the ranks will forgive the expression, Regular Guys. They drink beer, not wine, and certainly not French wine. They played football and baseball in high school, not lacrosse. Regular Guys think Al Sharpton is a fraud and Michael Moore (who pretends to be a Regular Guy) is a fool, and they think Ted Kennedy is a criminal. Regular Guys do not blame Secret Service agents (who are Regular Guys) for knocking them down on the ski slopes, especially when those agents are there to take bullets for them. And Regular Guys relate to and prefer the company of other Regular Guys; they do not invite people like Leonardo DiCaprio and Ben Affleck to their conventions.

Even with the piles of dough they’re sitting on, both George Bush and Dick Cheney still come across as Regular Guys, the kind of men you might find hanging around the fire station or the detective squad room.

Bush is also the guy that most people would have at one time wanted to have a beer with (I’m sure a few people have revoked that opinion since then.) But he’s not a “regular guy.” He’s “well-born.”

So in his very first column, Kristol engages in hackneyed stereotypes, historical revisionism, partisan hackery and shallow “analysis.” Surprised? Yeah, me neither.

Sorry for the extremely light blogging as of late, but we are three are, as the Romans might say, ad vitam paramus. Still, I would be remiss not to stop by for a moment and recommend some reading to you. So here go you.

First, there’s this revelatory comment that explains exactly why right-wing blogs are so incredibly lacking in influence but are still so incredibly useful to their masters in power. Why they blog in such a manner is left unexplained, though you would do well to refer to Bob Altermeyer for the definitive explanation on why those on the far right are for the most part incapable of thinking for themselves.

Also, in utterly un-shocking news, CIA personnel apparently destroyed videotaped interrogations of high-value terrorist suspects that involved them carrying out…um, embarrassing activities. They did so despite the fact that they were advised by nearly everyone-from officials in the Bush administration to members of Congress-to keep the tapes. Nonetheless, this news should come as no surprise, as frequently criminals will destroy evidence of their crimes. President Bush claims to know nothing about the tapes, which makes you wonder how effective a leader can be when he appears to know nothing about crucial activities of his underlings, like filming the torturing of terrorist suspects and then destroying those tapes, or concluding that Iran’s nuclear weapons program ended years ago. It would appear that, unlike our illustrious leader, some Democrats actually knew about the tapes and the plan to destroy them…and said nothing, of course (though some appear to want to at least make a show of closing the barn door even though the horse is long gone.)

Also, Howard Krongard, the naughty State IG whose job it seemed was more to cover up indiscretions than expose them, is out. Maybe now he’ll have time to sit down with his brother and talk about what they really talked about.

That’s it for now. Have a good weekend.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum reminds us that had the CIA bothered to keep those tapes, we would’ve been privileged to see the torture of a mentally ill detainee who-according to inside accounts-fabricated wild and fantastic plots. Of course to the right, this is probably a justification for torture. Better safe than sorry, eh?

Via Rollling Stone’s National Affairs Daily Blog, we learn from TPM Muckraker that the reason African-American waited in line so long to vote in Ohio in 2004 is because of their tendency to vote later in the day. No, really:

In June of 2005, John Tanner, the chief of the voting rights section, wrote Columbus, Ohio’s election officials to publicly assure them that the Justice Department had found no evidence of intentional African-American voter disenfranchisement in the 2004 election.

Not only was that an unprecedented move, former Department lawyers say, but the letter is another, and particularly galling, example of Tanner using the force of the Department to further Republican aims — in this case, to hamper future lawsuits or investigations concerning the problems in Columbus.

“It really looked like the Civil Rights Division was used to run interference for Republican election officials in Ohio,” former voting rights section deputy chief Bob Kengle told me.

At issue was the experience of thousands of voters in Franklin County, Ohio, in the 2004 election. Voters in mostly African-American precincts were forced to wait hours in long lines to vote. An investigation by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) found that voters often waited as many as four to five hours, some as many as seven, deep into the night. The Washington Post reported that “bipartisan estimates say that 5,000 to 15,000 frustrated voters turned away without casting ballots.” The culprit, of course, was a scarcity of voting machines in those districts, one that seemed to follow a suspicious trend: “27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush” and “six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry.”

But Tanner, who’s due to appear in a Congressional hearing, launched an investigation (more on that below) and found that “Franklin County assigned voting machines in a non-discriminatory manner,” as he wrote in a detailed 4-page letter to a local official. But if the distribution of the machines was non-discriminatory, why then were polling places in predominantly African-American areas forced to remain open for hours after the normal 7:30 PM closing time in order to accommodate the long lines?

Tanner explained that African-Americans simply vote later in the day:

.the principal cause of the difference appears to be the tendency in Franklin County for white voters to cast ballots in the morning (i.e., before work), and for black voters to cast ballots in the afternoon (i.e., after work). We have established this tendency through local contacts and through both political parties, and it accords with our considerable experience in other parts of the United States. Morning voters may wait in line several hours, as happened in white precincts, without keeping the polls open after 7:30 am; this is not the case, however, at sites where voters arrive after 5:30 p.m.

If that makes no damn sense to you, welcome to the club. I don’t know if there was some grand conspiracy to suppress the votes of African-American voters in Ohio in 2004, but there are odds and ends that are difficult to explain, and Bush administration officials-as usual-have gone out of their way to make sure they’re never explained. Can’t have anyone wondering about the legitimacy of two elections I guess.

…another fuc# up:

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company’s Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group’s communications network.

“Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless,” said Rita Katz, the firm’s 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE’s methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

The precise source of the leak remains unknown. Government officials declined to be interviewed about the circumstances on the record, but they did not challenge Katz’s version of events. They also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government’s ability to anticipate attacks.

While acknowledging that SITE had achieved success, the officials said U.S. agencies have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web. “We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies,” said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

But privately, some intelligence officials called the incident regrettable, and one official said SITE had been “tremendously helpful” in ferreting out al-Qaeda secrets over time.

“Regrettable” indeed. Best line:

…within minutes of Katz’s e-mail to the White House, government-registered computers began downloading the video from SITE’s server, according to a log of file transfers.

Why do you think Bush administration officials would be so eager to get news of this video out right away? That whole 9/11 anniversary thing might’ve had something to do with it. If you think that video just sort of “accidentally” got leaked a few days before September 11th and the Crocker-Patraeus heraings, I have some Nigerian cash I’ve inherited that I need to get out of the country with your help.

By the way, there was a great piece last summer in the Atlantic Monthly about Rita Katz, SITE and other private intelligence companies that are doing their best to infiltrate online jihad networks. Yes, they do real and important work, work that some Bush administration bozo saw fit to ruin in exchange for the opportunity for our President to remind us why we need to be fighting in Iraq for years to come. But let me ask you…do you feel safer this morning with these guys running the show?

In his fourth such action, President Bush vetoed legislation today that would expand the State Children Health Insurance Program to double – from 4 million to 8 million – the number of low-income children covered. He does so despite the fact that this had bipartisan support and is supported by an overwhelming majority of the American people – in yet another sign he is intent on taking the entire Republican Party with him. No wonder he did it behind close doors and without “fanfare.”

His reason? Supposedly, he’s suddenly a fiscal conservative after years of increasing federal spending under Republican control. By comparison, we’re spending almost $10 billion a month in Iraq. But what it is really about is ideology. Bush and conservative Republicans think that we can’t expand government (unless it has to do with the president’s war-making and intelligence powers) to give mostly very poor children health coverage they can’t otherwise get. Well, most people don’t hold to such stupid and extreme libertarian views because they recognize that if the free market took care of everything you wouldn’t have all those kids without health care in the first place.

Unfortunately, while the Senate has the 67 votes to override Bush’s veto, the House does not have the 290 votes necessary on their side. However, House Democratic leaders are going to wait on scheduling an override vote for a couple of weeks to build up support. It is likely Democrats can get most or all of they eight members of their caucus that voted against the bill to vote to override and many have said as much. The question now is whether they can put enough pressure on Republicans and get the 25 more votes they need. Democrats and liberal groups are already launching attack ads against endangered Republicans in an effort to do so. Let’s hope it works.

This Washington Post piece details an article in the Spanish newspaper El Pais (original here) about a supposed offer from Saddam Hussein to go into exile prior to the invasion of Iraq, so long as he could take $1 billion and “information” on Iraq’s WMDs with him. But what I found most interesting about the article is the picture it paints of a President who simply couldn’t wait to start getting people killed in Iraq:

The account offered a rare glimpse of how Bush interacted with a trusted foreign leader, offering blunt assessments and showing a determination that led even Aznar, a close ally on Iraq, to ask that Bush show “a little more patience” in the march toward war. Bush expressed anger and irritation at those governments that disagreed with him, warning that they would pay a price. He directed particular scorn toward then-French President Jacques Chirac, one of the most public opponents of invasion, saying Chirac “sees himself as Mr. Arab.”

Although Bush’s public position at the time of the meeting was that the door remained open for a diplomatic solution, hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops had already been deployed to Iraq’s border, and the White House had made its impatience clear. “Time is short,” Bush said in a news conference with [Spanish PM Jose Maria] Aznar the same day.

[Aznar] expressed hope that war might be avoided — or at least supported by a U.N. majority — and Bush said that outcome would be “the best solution for us” and “would also save us $50 billion,” referring to the initial U.S. estimate of what the Iraq war would cost. But Bush made it clear in the meeting that he expected to “be in Baghdad at the end of March.”

“It’s like Chinese water torture,” he said of the U.N. negotiations. “We’ve got to put an end to it.”

Bush noted that he had gone to the United Nations “despite differences in my own administration” and said it would be “great” if the proposed resolution was successful.

“The only thing that worries me is your optimism,” Aznar said.

“I’m optimistic because I believe I’m right,” Bush replied. “I’m at peace with myself.”

That apparently hasn’t changed, at least if the amount of sleep Bush is getting is any measure. However, some of us Americans spend our time at night wondering how a man so intellectually incurious and inflexible could possibly have persuaded fellow Americans to vote for him.