A robust culture of reporting things

Of all the subject lines in emails I’ve received from presidential campaigns, this has to be the most pathetic: “Biden surges past Richardson in Iowa.” He has 8% to Richardson’s 4% in a poll of likely caucus-goers. The email adds that he is “closing in on the front-runners” (Edwards, Clinton & Obama range from 23 to 27%).

Speaking of fuzzy math, the LAT notes that the US military is relying on Iraqi numbers about things like civilian deaths, enemy attacks, etc, and that those numbers... wait for it... may not be altogether accurate. Says a colonel on Petraeus’s planning staff, “The Iraqis don’t have a robust culture of reporting things.”

Late in the article there’s a mention of something I hadn’t heard before: “In October, for example, the entire command and control system used by Iraqi security forces to communicate with headquarters was shut down for two weeks when the government failed to pay the U.S. contractor that provides the satellite communications. For those two weeks, U.S. commanders and the Iraqi government received no reports from Iraqi forces in the field.”

In honor of World AIDS day (tomorrow), Bush gave yet another speech on the subject (at a Methodist church, naturally) which failed to mention gay people. Indeed, he mentioned the people who actually have HIV/AIDS only in passing, and none by name. Instead, he focused on “people who have dedicated their lives to save lives.” Especially if those people are motivated by religion, by the “universal call to love a neighbor”, the “timeless calling to heal the sick [he may have forgotten that AIDS can’t actually be healed] and comfort the lonely.” Generosity is a favorite word of Bush’s, especially when talking about American assistance to Africa, although I’m not sure such fulsome praise of one’s own “generosity” is really consistent with a generosity of spirit. People with the disease appeared in the speech only as the passive objects of that generosity. Or worse, since he implies that they got it because of their lack of proper Christian morals: “Faith-based groups... are changing behavior by changing hearts -- and they are helping to defeat this epidemic one soul at a time.” World AIDS Day, he said, is “a day we resolve to continue this work of healing and redemption.” Who is it he thinks requires redemption?