sum numbers: iraq war version

the institute for policy studies has a new report out called "Paying the Price: The Mounting Costs of the Iraq War"
A Study by the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy In Focus

here are the numbers:

* Total number of coalition military deaths between the start of war
and June 16, 2004: 952 (836 U.S.)
* Of those 952, the number killed after President George W. Bush
declared an end to major combat operations on May 1, 2003: 693
* Number of U.S. troops wounded in combat since the war began: 5,134
(Number ill or injured in "non-combat" incidents estimated to be
over 11,000)
* Number of U.S. troops wounded in combat since President George W.
Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1, 2003:
4,593
* Number of civilian contractors, missionaries, and civilian workers
killed: 50-90
* Number of international media workers killed: 30
* Iraqi civilians killed: 9,436 to 11,317
* Iraqi civilians injured: 40,000 (est.)
* Iraqi soldiers and insurgents killed prior to May 1, 2003: 4,895
to 6,370

* The bill so far: $126.1 billion
* Additional amount to cover operations through 2004: $25 billion
* What $151 billion could have paid for in the U.S.:
o Housing vouchers: 23 million
o Health care for uninsured Americans: 27 mil.
o Salaries for elementary school teachers: 3 mil.
o New fire engines: 678,200
o Head Start slots: 20 million

* Estimated long-term cost of war to every U.S. household: $3,415
* Amount contractor Halliburton is alleged to have charged for meals
never served to troops and for cost overruns on fuel deliveries:
$221 million
* Kickbacks received by Halliburton employees from subcontractors:
$6 million

* Percentage of Americans who now feel that the situation in Iraq
was not worth going to war over: 54
* Percentage of Iraqis who said they would feel safer if U.S. and
other foreign troops left the country immediately: 55

* Percentage of U.S. soldiers in Iraq reporting low morale: 52
* Percentage of soldiers who said they would not re-enlist: 50
* Percentage of wounded unable to return to duty: 64

* Number of soldiers whose tours of duty have been extended by the
Army: 20,000
* Percentage of reserve troops who earn lower salaries while on
deployment: 30-40
* Fraction of National Guard troops among U.S. force now in Iraq: 1/3
* Percentage of U.S. police departments missing officers due to Iraq
deployments: 44

* Effect on al Qaeda of the Iraq war, according to International
Institute for Strategic Studies: Accelerated recruitment
* Estimated number of al Qaeda terrorists as of May 2004: 18,000
with 1,000 active in Iraq

* Percentage of Iraqis expressing "no confidence" in U.S. civilian
authorities or coalition forces: 80

* Iraq's oil production in 2002: 2.04 mil. barrels/day
* Iraq's oil production in 2003: 1.33 mil. barrels/day
* Price of a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. in May 2004: more than $2

just in case you weren't getting this information from your local evening news...

freedumb of speech

although i miss him when he's away, i must admit that i tend to enjoy the musings of the sometimes-blogger-in-lieu-of tom tomorrow, bob harris, due to, in contrast to mr. tomorrow, the sheer volume of his postings. some of his latest go well with one of our previous offerings here at tepidity, the one about the media carta. but don't take my word for it. go and check out the rest of his most recent and timely posts on the handover of power in iraq and the highs and lows of the american media coverage of the whole mess at this modern world. here's a taste:

"Great Thinkers Address Freedom Of Speech
(Note: this entry posted by Bob Harris)

'I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies another this right makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.'
-- Thomas Paine, 1783

'Free speech exercised both individually and through a free press, is a necessity in any country where people are themselves free.'
-- Theodore Roosevelt, 1918

'The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.'
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936

'If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.'
-- George Orwell, 1945

'Any time we deny any citizen the full exercise of his constitutional rights, we are weakening our own claim to them.'
-- Dwight David Eisenhower, 1963

'What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant.'
-- Robert F. Kennedy, 1964

'Go fuck yourself.'
-- Dick Cheney, 2004"

now that your appetite has been sufficiently whetted, what are you waiting for? go on!

and yes, the past participle of whet is whetted.

take back the media

since i always do everything that i am told to do, i signed the media carta this morning, as directed by the kind folks at adbusters. take a look:

WE THE UNDERSIGNED, are troubled by the way information flows and the way meaning is produced in our society.

WE HAVE LOST CONFIDENCE in what we are seeing, hearing and reading: too much infotainment and not enough news; too many outlets telling the same stories; too much commercialism and too much hype. Every day, this commercial information system distorts our view of the world.

WE HAVE LOST FAITH in the institutions of the mass media. A handful of corporations now control more than half the information networks around the world. At a time when people worldwide face hunger, social disruption, war and ecological collapse, only those who know how to walk the walk, talk the talk or pay big bucks are getting their message across.

WE HAVE LOST HOPE that our national media regulators will act in the public interest. Essential rules limiting media ownership and concentration are being scrapped, while rules protecting local content and access are diluted.

WE HAVE LOST PATIENCE waiting for reform.

WE IMAGINE A DIFFERENT SYSTEM – a media democracy. We see great promise in the open communications of the internet and want that openness expanded into every form of media. We envision a global system of communications that has as its foundation the direct, democratic participation of citizens. To this end, we demand the timely transfer of key media sources back to the people.

As a start, we demand the right to buy radio and television airtime under the same rules and conditions as advertising agencies. We ask our media regulators to set aside two minutes of every broadcast hour for citizen-produced messages. We want the six largest media corporations in the world broken up into smaller units.

What we ultimately seek is a new human right for our information age, one that empowers freedom of speech with the right to access the media. This new human right is: The Right to Communicate.

WE HEREBY LAUNCH A MOVEMENT to enshrine The Right to Communicate in the constitutions of all free nations, and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

we here at tepidity agree with the above statement and dare you to join us in our agreement so that we may all be agreed. go ahead, sign it. what have you got to lose except your eternal soul?

out of the frying pan

once in a while, i am called upon to actually do more than just pronounce a few words. this past week is an example. you see, while i have enjoyed assisting the english teachers here in yokogawa, i have recently begun to become, well, bored. no offense intended towards any of the remarkably talented individuals with whom i have had the distinct pleasure of sharing the podium...but i was having trouble keeping my eyes open in class, to tell the truth. my third cycle through a pretty dry textbook was beginning and i was starting to feel the heavy drag of another hot, humid japanese summer. along with that, my partner in crime, kayo yamanouchi sensei, had recently been blessed with the lodging of not one but two tiny humans deep within her belly. fittingly, she moved back to her home town in order to prepare for the pregnancy and i was presented with a new teacher, mr. homan, with whom i thought i would be ending my term here. mr. homan had retired from teaching a few years ago but was brought here to fill in as an emergency teacher while the board of education figured out what to do. he had been hoping that they would ask him to stay on until the end of the year, but, chotto sadly, they rather abruptly decided to let him get back to his retirement. that was last week. one day we were talking about how i don't speak like an english chap and the next day we were saying "sayonara". so it goes.

to make a long story short, i had been expecting to come in to work on tuesday to meet a new teacher, work with her for my final 5 weeks, and then move on to bigger and better things. however, i went to the office on monday for my "lesson-planning" time (i mostly just drink coffee and read time magazine and grit my teeth) and my supervisor told me that there was some kind of vague "unfortunate circumstances" and that the new teacher wouldn't be coming for some indefinite period of time - could be a few days, could be a few weeks. all of a sudden, i went from being a bored, semi-conscious human "repeat-after-me" machine to a full blown but poorly trained teacher. no lesson plans, just a text book and some flash cards with words like "useful" and "common" and "hamburger" (which i tried to change to "veggieburger" but the kids didn't get it) was all that stood between me and a room of 41 seventh graders. my mission, should i have chosen to accept it, was to make them learn the plural forms of nouns, the infinitive and present perfect forms of verbs, and the correct pronounciation of it all whilst sweating profusely in the 85 degree, 90% humidity of the mid-june rainy season.

so needless to say, i have been a bit busier than usual.

but nevertheless, i guess i ended up making this short story long...

tony's fantasy

looks like the tropical air down there on okinoerabu has invaded whatever part of our good friend tony's brain that regulates his ability to perceive reality. just look at what he sent me:

Dude, Bush isn't going to win more than 4 or 5 states.
What are you smoking?
My money is that he won't even be allowed to accept
his party's nomination.

I think this attack on DeLay may be the only thing
that saves him from a power move from Hastert and
Frist.

The torture scandal is about to engulf Ashcroft,
Albert Gonzalez, Steve Cambone, Doulas Feith,
Rumsfeld, Dick Myers, Sanchez, and possibly Wolfowitz.
It already knocked off the top two at CIA.

The Plame affair is going to knock off Lewis Scooter
Libby and Karl Rove.

The 9/11 Commission is about to wobble Bush's image as
a strong leader on 9/11 and the movie Fahrenheit 911
is going to knock him down in the dirt with 11 minutes
of Bush reading a book about a pet goat while new
yorkers do 100 story swandives off the twin towers.

Cheney is caught in a lie about Halliburton contracts,
he is about to lose his case to keep the Energy Task
Force shit secret, he already has about a 28% approval
rating.

Sharon Bush has a book coming out talking about how
corrupt the Bush family is.

They are about to indict people for stealing files on
Capitol Hill.

Clinton's book is coming out with the movie The
Hunting of the President.

Iraq is descending into a pure hell, we don't have any
troops to dissuade Iran from going nuclear.

Powell and Armitage are opening and intentionally
harming the President.

The CIA is on a warpath to destroy the President.

The civilians at Justice are feeding the torture
scandal, as are the JAG's at the Pentagon.

There has not been one single Republican senator
willing to go on TV and defend the President in 6
months.

Donald Gregg, Bush Sr.'s chief of staff when he was VP
basically called Bush Jr. a war criminal in the NY
Times op-ed this week.

George Will has called them incompetent.

Pat Buchanan is on the warpath against the neo-cons.

Tucker Carlson has renounced the administration.

Anthony Zinni wrote a book with Tom Clancy calling
them criminally incompetent.

Paul O'Neill called the deaf leading the blind.

Richard Clarke said they did nothing on terrorism.

Rand Beers is working for Kerry.

The libertarians have already abandoned the party.

The idiots scheduled their convention in NYC where
Bush is polling under 25%.

I could go on.

Kerry is letting the Republicans do his campaigning
for him.

It is June.

The end of next month is the time to step up and put
the stake in the heart.

But before that, I believe that Frist and Hastert will
make a power play and ask Bush not to accept the
nomination since if he does they will lose their
leadership positions and he will get impeached.

Hastert will become President, Frist will accept the
nomination, and pick Pataki for a running mate.

And the real election will be on.

see what i mean? (looks like it actually came from someone over at daily kos, but who's keeping score?)

and R.I.P. to the lakers. i say this having been born in inglehood, california. they did not deserve the title...but i think i have nonetheless died a little bit on me insides...
go rams?

dear leader

thanks to my dad for sending this along. although we may not agree on what the reagan legacy will ultimately prove to entail, we can at least honor the man as having lived here on this earth. life is hard. he lived well enough to become an old man - which i, too, hope to become in due time - and for that at least, i guess, respect is warranted.

all the other hoopla surrounding his death, however, left me feeling quite scared and confused. i'm not even sure why. a presidential corpse paraded hither and thither for most of a week, dominating all news in the meantime; bush and his handlers starting in with the comparisons: (from frank rich of the ny times)

...no one has more strenuously tried to emulate the 40th president in both style and substance than George W. Bush. Reagan's body was barely cold when Ed Gillespie, the Republican chairman, said: "The parallels are there. I don't know how you miss them."

...

The White House's efforts to follow the Reagan playbook have been nothing if not relentless. As Michael Deaver's crew famously would have Reagan cut ribbons in front of nursing homes even as he cut funds for their construction, so Mr. Bush can be found communing with nature each time his administration takes a whack at the environment. To pass himself off as a practiced hand at proletarian manual labor, Mr. Bush clears brush on camera at his ranch in Crawford just as Mr. Reagan did in Santa Barbara. In Washington, the Bush speechwriters strain to equate an "axis of evil" with the "evil empire."

i think this kirk cartoon sums it up well: it's nice to remember the good stuff, but it's important not to forget the bad.
for what it's worth.

true drama

the final 10 seconds of game 2 of the nba finals is the reason why i still pay attention to sports at all. watching the game live during my lunchbreak, knowing that it was all happening a half a world away and that the outcome had no effect whatsoever on the classes i had to teach that afternoon, i still couldn't help but get caught up in the humanity of it all.
it brought a tear to me eye.
the series is tied, let's hope it goes to seven games.

god bless you, mr. rosewater

thanks to anne for sending this to me:

Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.


But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America's becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

how's that for scathing? i shall proceed to quote at length because i find that his writing compels me to do so:

Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning: As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I'm of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.


Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?


How about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?


Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.


Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.


Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. ...


And so on.


Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff.


For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.


"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

the image that i hope to leave with you tonight will be your "war prezident" surrounded by his generals and other war planners discussing shock and awe and the hell that they are about to unleash on a group of their fellow human beings with the words "Blessed are the Peacemakers" mounted and framed on the wall behind them. sweet dreams!

good night and god bless.

michael moore hates america

in case you needed another reason to have serious reservations about this administration, here is the trailer to michael moore's new moving picture show "fahrenheit 9/11" - and as a bit of bonus good news, they got a canadian company to distribute the film in america and will be opening it on june 25. isn't that lovely?

so go see it and tell me all about it. i doubt it will make it all the way to kagoshima...

Holy Supreme Planetary Overlord

REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE
> CONVENTION SCHEDULE
> New York, NY

> 6:00 PM Opening Prayer led by the Reverend Jerry Falwell
> 6:30 PM Pledge of Allegiance
> 6:35 PM Burning of Bill of Rights (excluding 2nd Amendment)
> 6:45 PM Salute to the Coalition of the Willing
> 6:46 PM Seminar #1: Getting Your Kid a Military Deferment
> 7:30 PM First Presidential Beer Bong
> 7:35 PM Freedom Fries served
> 7:40 PM EPA Address #1: Mercury: It's What's for Dinner
> 8:00 PM Vote on which country to invade next
> 8:10 PM Call EMTs to revive Rush Limbaugh
> 8:15 PM John Ashcroft Lecture: The Homos Are After Your Children
> 8:30 PM Round table discussion on reproductive rights (men only)
> 8:50 PM Seminar #2: Corporations: The Government of the Future
> 9:00 PM Condi Rice sings "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man"
> 9:05 PM Second Presidential Beer Bong
> 9:10 PM EPA Address #2: Trees: The Real Cause of Forest Fires
> 9:30 PM break for secret meetings
> 10:00 PM Second Prayer led by Cal Thomas
> 10:15 PM Carl Rove Lecture: Doublespeak Made Simple
> 10:30 PM Rumsfeld Lecture/Demonstration: How to Squint and Talk Macho Even When You Feel Squishy Inside
> 10:35 PM Bush demonstration of trademark "deer in headlights" stare
> 10:40 PM John Ashcroft Demonstration: New Mandatory Kevlar Chastity Belt
> 10:45 PM Clarence Thomas reads list of black Republicans
> 10:46 PM Third Presidential Beer Bong
> 10:50 PM Seminar #3: Education: A Drain on Our Nation's Economy
> 11:10 PM Hilary Clinton Pinata
> 11:20 PM John Ashcroft Lecture: Evolutionists: A Dangerous New Cult
> 11:30 PM Call EMTs to revive Rush Limbaugh again
> 11:35 PM Blame Clinton
> 11:40 PM Laura serves milk and cookies
> 11:50 PM Closing Prayer led by Jesus Himself
> 12:00 AM Nomination of George W. Bush as Holy Supreme Planetary Overlord

from Jeff,

Official Photographer
United States Senate
Washington, D.C.

(cutting and pasting by yours truly)

all doubts assuaged

thanks to our diligent friends compiling notes on the atrocities, we needn't worry about the election anymore:

Here's the truth: Kerry will win, and he'll probably win big.

i have decided to leave a permanent link to notes on the sidebar because of the consistently high-caliber postings i find there. give it a gander and see if you don't agree. i dare you. go ahead. what have you got to lose? and don't forget to check out their invaluable dossiers on bush, cheney, ashcroft, and (coming soon) rumsfeld!

fun time

this is for entertainment purposes only. bush follows the money and blair follows him.

thanks be to tony. again.

sum numbers

for those of you who like polls, some of the latest numbers are saying what we here at tepid industries have been worrying about since the get go: will there be enough people voting for kerry - not just against bush - to get the shrub out of office and put the country back on a path towards "liberty and justice for all"? julian brookes over at mojo breaks it down for us:

To the question, asked of Bush supporters, "Is your vote more for George W. Bush or more against John Kerry?" 77 percent said "for Bush," and 22 percent "against Kerry." The version of the question aimed at Kerry supporters: 38 percent say they'll vote "for Kerry," 61 percent "against Bush." Among Democrats, 41 percent say they'll be voting for Kerry; 58 percent say they're voting against Bush.

so you see, while the bushites support him outright, kerry supporters don't seem to even really support him at all; his support thus far seems - dare i say - tepid? hopefully, as time goes on and the man starts to lay it all out for us, we will see what he's made of and more people will be able to proudly proclaim that they support john kerry because of who he is and how he will lead america, not just because he isn't bush.

john and joan q. voter responded to bush over al gore in the 2000 election because they thought that he seemed like more of a down-to-earth, albeit mildly retarded, plain-talkin' cowpoke, look-you-in-the-eye kind of guy. if kerry gets out in front of the republican attack ads and defines himself as himself, i don't see how he can lose this thing. he certainly can't do a worse job than butt-head over there.

but what the hell do i know.