Chart of the Day, Get Some Perspective Edition

by folkbum

We're nearing the 9-year anniversary of our latest Grand Adventure overseas. Here's a graph I'm stealing from ED Kain (who got it from here). You'll have to click on it or one of the links just now to read the type. But that's part of what makes it stunning.




Bonus chart of the day, from Kevin Drum, which offers a similar whack in the head on a different subject entirely:



This is a chart of share of income as it has changed in the past 30 years. On the left is 1979, and the brown line, one of only two to see positive growth in share of income (and it has doubled!) is the top 1% of households. The blue line is the next 4% of households. Some--not all!--of these folks would pay a few percent more tax only on income they earn over $250,000 under plans by Democrats. Republicans don't want to let that happen.

Frank Rich: Your complaining about the mosque* at** Ground Zero undermines Petraeus

by folkbum

Of course, Rich doesn't offer any stats or an actual quote from Patraeus to show that that's true, but he makes a compelling case that it may well be:

Here’s what’s been lost in all the screaming. The prime movers in the campaign against the “ground zero mosque” just happen to be among the last cheerleaders for America’s nine-year war in Afghanistan. The wrecking ball they’re wielding is not merely pounding Park51, as the project is known, but is demolishing America’s already frail support for that war, which is dedicated to nation-building in a nation whose most conspicuous asset besides opium is actual mosques.

So virulent is the Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right--abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti-Defamation League, Harry Reid and other cowed Democrats--that it has also rendered Gen. David Petraeus’s last-ditch counterinsurgency strategy for fighting the war inoperative. How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?

Rich goes on to lay out show how the ignorant stupid-head critics of the Park 51 plan are not merely ignorant stupid-heads wrong on the facts, but also ignorant stupid-heads intent on scoring a few electoral points at the expense of nine years and trillions of dollars trying to undermine and eradicate radical Islamists around the globe.

I ask, politely, that my ignorant stupid-head anti-Park51 readers to explain to me how Rich is wrong.

* it's not a mosque
** it's not at Ground Zero

The Look of Leadership

Keith R. Schmitz

Maybe John McCain wishes he could take back his goading of Barack Obama to go to Iraq.

The Illinois Senator is making his way through the world leaders this week, with a lot of press focus on the trip. He could screw up but the odds are not in favor of a miss-step.

In the meantime we have the White House reconfiguring "withdraw" and "time-line" to read "time-horizon." No matter how you slice it, this is means our troops leaving Iraq. In the meantime McCain stutters and stammers that we can't think about dates.

I'm not too confident though that a Republican administration would follow through on a departure. After all, there are those oil contracts to protect, and with the prospect that a Democratic administration could mean a lot of perp-walking for members of the Bush Administration the strategy for the GOP I'll be is promise them anything, but give them the screw.

Then again, McCain is talking redeployment of US troops from Iraq to the unraveling Afghanistan effort -- just as Obama has advocated previously. I'm not wild about the prospects of spending people and money in that country because of what Afghanistan did to Britain over a hundred years ago and the USSR more recently. As much as Reagan worshippers keep droning on about how the Gipper drank the Ruskies under the table, it appears Charlie Wilson's war and the Afghan fighters drained the Evil Empire.

For someone who is being portrayed as a rookie senator, more and more it looks like judgement rather than so-called experience is defining leadership.

Losing Yet Another War

by capper

First, we have four and half year of dubious news on the war in Iraq, with predictions that Bush's war games could go on for at least two more years. Then we find out that things in Afghanistan isn't going so well, and al Qaeda is building up to pre-9/11 strength.

Now, we find out that due to the feds, the war on drugs is going to go up in smoke, with delays in federal funding for drug rehab services, and an expected drop in overall funding. Not only will there be more people going without services for longer times, but it will also increase the crime rate, as the addicts start getting desperate for a fix. This also shows some real fiscal responsibility, causing taxpayers to shovel out money seven times faster, as reported here:

Conor Williams, a spokesman for the Milwaukee Innercity Congregations Allied for Hope, said untreated addictions lead to jail and prison, where the costs are significantly higher than treatment. A 1994 Rand Corp. study showed that $1 spent on addiction treatment saves $7 in law enforcement and jail costs, he added.

Mr. Williams goes on to state that if Milwaukee County could bail out the Milwaukee Public Museum, it should be able to find a way to find the money to help provide these services.

But Mr. Williams, and those of us who agree with his sentiment, should be painfully aware by now that the Republicans are not interested in helping anyone, except themselves and their pals.