corrente

We're casting pearls before swine and not even getting a damn pork chop in return.

(via Juan Cole), who is venturing further into politics these days:

Edwards may be the Anti-Cheney in ways that could be important to the campaign. Cheney's use of foul language on the Senate floor and increasing testiness suggest that he feels vulnerable on the Halliburton issue.

One of the scandals that has been reported but hasn't really broken yet is the way in which Halliburton gained contracts to provide services to US troops in an emergency but has been unable actually to provide those services. The summer of 2003 was hell on the troops because they had no quonset huts or air conditioning. Their shaving cream cans were exploding in the desert.

Why didn't the army just build them quonset huts? Because that task had been contracted out to civilians. And why didn't civilians do the job? Because civilians cannot be ordered into a war zon, and Halliburton and KBR often simply could not put enough civilian personnel into the field to do the jobs contracted for in a timely manner.

Who suffered? The US troops. Why? Because the Bush administration gave a soldier's job to wealthy civilian corporations unequipped to handle it. Edwards is well placed to make hay with this sort of thing if he is canny about it.

If you never put Juan Cole on your bookmarks/favorites list, you really should. If you have him there but don't read him every day, you really should as well. The SCLM are still covering iWreck but it's no longer the lead on the networks every night. The whole point of the "turnover" was to get the US press out and your attention elsewhere.