It would be cheaper for someone else to invest the 20-30 billion dollars it needs to upgrade, maintain and modernize. After that, it doesn't matter oil is oil and we're still stuck with the same insufficient clunky refining infrastructure as before. But, as I said we're going to leave Iraq in 2011 give or take. By then Kurdistan will be an autonomous republic (hint - a lot of oil is there) and the rest of the country will be showering each other with car bombs.

To those of you doomgloomers wondering if there will even be elections next year - OF COURSE there will be. There is no strategic advantage not to, not with this Congress and the ennui of the blogerati classes. Craven stupidity on the part of the administration has eliminated the need for a junta in America. It's unnecessary to physically hold on to power at all. Either all the players are interchangeable or, the Presidential role itself is completely superfluous. It just depends on who is elected.

Come Jan 2009 you will see a torrent of punditry decrying the sudden 'expansion in the power of the Presidency' like you have never seen and power will switch back to the 2010 Republican dominated Congress. Which will then begin impeachment hearings for whichever Democratic President happens to be in office for any reason they want.

See you folks are playing the wrong game. A game with rules. That's stupid. That was kind of the sense I got from the few brief minutes of the debate last night. That all the Dem Candidates were happily congratulating one another on what a fine system we have that champions the rights of the rightless and uplifts the downtrodden. All the while sitting in their little stage play, their diorama. I truly believe that the Dems are blind to the staggeringly high likelihood that the US is poised to be a one party system in the next 3 years. One which the party IS the government. Why would you need a revolution at that point?

Interestingly carriers e.g. Sprint just recently expired, reduced or canceled some of their deeper discounts on some of their higher end phones. Seems that everyone else is watching AT&T to set new higher baseline price points.

2009 is rather aggressive. Iran probably won't have a functioning 'gadget' (e.g. scientific atomic explosion test) until the end of 2009 and they won't have a deployable weapon before 2011. So 2011 the earliest that the US will leave Iraq. That makes today the halfway point in our little adventure.

Called before Congress is going to stand on the desk, unzip his fly and invite the Esteemed Gentlemen to suck it, suck it hard. And Congress will grumble and move on to the next question. I really fail to see the purpose of trying to shame the shameless.

There's always one, you know 'church schooled' 4 note range, bellows out those trills like all get out. Oh it's not American Idol? My bad.

Didn't watch more than a minute or two. Seemed like just a gimmick with YouTube. If they thought they would pull in the under 25's with anything that ran more than 4 minutes total, they were wrong.

You mean with Libya it's magically NOT about oil? Curious. If I were ELF Acquitaine and I wanted new contracts in the closest former European colony with lots of cheap high quality oil and almost no people (who by the way almost all speak Italian or French already) I'd make sure I intervened.

Similarly the several thousand French troops in the Central Africa Republic securing forward bases for guerrillas who strike into Congo in exchange for ready access to COLTAN supplies and one or two oil pipelines, that can't possibly be about mercantile self interest, can it?

Similarly the several thousand French troops there were deployed in Cote d'Ivoire ostensibly to protect the French nationals there while securing supplies of coffee, cocoa, hardwood, that can't be anything other than the altruism of fair minded people too.

Of everything is everything. Of there are no bad, crazy, stupid ideas, only bad men and women you need to scold and correct and humiliate, what's the point then? Blogging is successful because it is unedited. It is the raw crude stream of every babbling idiot's bad ideas. Editors therefore just become a steering committee for generally pointing a publication this direction or that. Were you to clean and tighten that up, people would lose interest. It's not about you, it's about me me me me me me me.

You'd never hear from him again, here. Salon secretly believes Harry wears a Che t-shirt under his cape.

It was about extermination.

And you know this how, precisely? Ever done a phone stint for your local Democratic Congressman? I have. Ever get in a tussle with the cops at a protest? I have. Ever do the grunt work that helps get people elected or other people not elected? I have.

I mean all this sturm drang nacht und nebel. What do you folks think is a credible thing to 'do'? Vote from the rooftops? Giant puppets? Blogging? You act as if being indignant is enough. It's not. So what are you willing to do?