Meet The New Boss

George The Shrub's Excellent Adventure hasn't had quite the results he told us we could count on.

So, meet the new Saddam, same as the old Saddam.  Or maybe, meet the new Ayatollah, same as the old Ayatollah(?)

From The Week:

Who is al-Baghdadi?
He's an Islamic scholar, poet, and Sunni extremist who is as much as an enigma to his followers as he is to his enemies. Born Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai in the central Iraqi city of Samarra, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, 43, is believed to have started his career as a preacher of Salafism, a hard-line form of Sunni Islam, and to have a degree in history and a doctorate in sharia law. After the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, he led a Sunni militant group that fought against American troops. Captured by U.S. forces in 2005, he was held for four years at Camp Bucca, a U.S. military prison. There, he met several al Qaeda commanders. In 2009, the U.S. turned al-Baghdadi over to Iraqi authorities as part of a Bush administration agreement with the Iraqis. Col. Ken King, who oversaw Camp Bucca, recalls al-Baghdadi taunting his American captors at the time, "I'll see you guys in New York." He was quickly released by the Iraqis and used his prison contacts to take over an al Qaeda–aligned militant group, the Islamic State of Iraq. Shortly after, he began an offensive to seize territory.

No Shame

Olbermann

Just in case you've grown unfamiliar with such things because of our long national drought - what Keith just did there - that's a little thing us oldsters used call Journalism.

Linda Cohn (also at ESPN) has been guilty of unapologetically committing Acts of Reportage as well.  I just can't find any good clips of her work on the Ray Rice thing right now.

Today In Connecting Dots

From The Boston Globe, via Charlie Pierce:

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A Utah elementary school teacher who was carrying a concealed firearm at school accidentally shot herself in the leg when the weapon discharged in a faculty bathroom shortly before classes started Thursday morning, officials said.

The teacher at Westbrook Elementary School, in the Salt Lake City suburb of Taylorsville, was severely injured when the bullet entered and exited her leg, and she was rushed to a hospital, Granite School District spokesman Ben Horsley said. She was in good condition and alert at the hospital by midmorning, Horsley said.

And now the dots part (well, kinda anyway) from Army Times:

Outside of the war zone, active-duty troops are dying by firearms at a rate 62 percent higher than a decade ago and are injured by firearms at three times the rate they were in 2002, according to a Defense Department report.

In a trend that defies the armed services' focus on weapon and range safety, as well as suicide prevention, 4,657 service members were injured by firearms outside of combat from 2002 to 2011, more than one-third, or 1,623, fatally.

In the previous decade, by comparison, the military had 446 deaths from gunshot wounds not related to combat and 1,919 injuries requiring hospitalization, according to a September report from the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center.

So lemme see if I've got this straight.  The Army - the people who are really well-trained and who actually know what the fuck they're doing when it comes to weapons - the US-fucking-Army is struggling with the problem of injury and death because of firearms, and somehow, we're absolutely sure that putting guns in our schools is the best way to keep everybody SAFE!?!

What else has to happen?  And at what point in some hoped-for future does our societal psyche stop and say, "What the fuck were we thinking?"

A Little Chopin

Waltz in A Minor --Frederic Chopin

Standards

Allowing somebody else to impose any kind of arbitrary "standards of beauty" on us is at least a little iffy.  Buying into the manipulative bullshit of advertising and manufactured opinion, and then remaining apathetic about it is dangerous for a society and too often deadly for individuals.



Just the way you are, ladies.  Honest.

Today's Toon

You can't kill your way out of your problems.  If that was possible, we wouldn't still be arguing over the death penalty; there would be no dissent in places like Iran; and people would be naming their babies after assholes like Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot.  Half a generation from now, what's the likelihood of a Muslim kid growing up in Iraq or Yemen or Afghanistan with the name Barack?  I'm not making Obama equivalent to those legendarily monumental piles of bug shit.  I wouldn't need to do that even if that was my intent because we should all know by now that those kids are going to get plenty of help to do exactly that.

 

Never worked before for anybody else - not gonna work now for us.

But hey - let's just pretend this is what American Exceptionalism is all about - we do everything better.

Just remember this one thing:  People have been out to conquer the world for the better part of a thousand centuries, but somehow, the world remains undefeated.

Today's Today

Nobody gets over something like 9-11, but we all have to figure out how to get past it.

Die, Sweet Road Runner, Die

Happy Blog-iversary To Me

5 years ago today.

E'Ville Times back in the day.

How great I art.