Incompetence from Current TV. I just wasted a half hour of my life trying to participate in the discussion area around Keith Olbermann's new show on Current TV. I registered as a new user, logged in at the login page for the overall site, then clicked on an Olbermann video. At that page, I see that I am NOT logged in. So I click at the "login" link on the Olbermann page, and am taken back to the Current login page, where I am shown as logged in. I go back to the Olbermann page and I'm NOT logged in. I try to leave a comment, and there is a button at the bottom of the comment screen that should permit me to post that comment as "LCraigSchoonmaker", my login name. So the server knows who I am. But I am told that the comment could not be posted, perhaps because I'm not logged in!
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I then go to the Current TV "feedback" area to tell them about this problem, describe it, then try to send that feedback. It asks for my email address and password. I fill them in, as I registered them. It refuses to send the feedback, saying it has no record of that email address. I give up.
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How on Earth did such incompetence take control of Current TV? I want to watch Keith Olbermann's new incarnation of Countdown, and participate in the online community around it, but I cannot. My cable company, Cablevision (from which I have cable modem and wifi only), does not 'currently' carry Current TV. Will Current offer Countdown as a free podcast thru iTunes, as MSNBC did? I don't know. And I'm not at all certain the incompetents at Current will think to tell people one way or the other.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,462 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:10 PM

 
Cowards and Fools on Afghanistan. A CBS News poll today revealed that 64% of respondents want the U.S. to reduce troop levels in Afghanistan. And "Half of Americans - 51 percent - think the U.S. should not be involved in the war in Afghanistan". A number of members of Congress are becoming vocal to the same effect. What a bunch of losers.
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The CBS Evening News story about that poll said that 164 American military were killed in Afghanistan so far this year, as tho that means anything. 164 individuals! My GOD, what a catastrophic, unsustainable loss! There are, after all, only 308 MILLION Americans, and a mere 1.2 MILLION in the armed forces! At the rate of 164 dead in a bit more than 5 months, the U.S. military will be entirely wiped out in — what? 36,585 months, or a mere 3,048 years! The horror! We're being wiped out by this catastrophic war!
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The total U.S. death toll in Afghanistan is 1,614, in nearly ten years. By contrast, the death toll of D-Day, one day in WWII (67 years ago this week), was 2,499 — 1.5 TIMES as many, in a single day, as the entire course of the Afghan war to date. So is the current war's death toll an unbearable catastrophe, or trivia, as wars go? Did Americans bitch and moan about the deaths on D-Day, and say that WWII was just not worth fiting? Or were Americans a hardier breed in 1944 than they are today?
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Not all polls show the exact same weakness of will. A Washington Post/ABC poll shows support actually up in the last month, but still to only 43% as against 31% in March.
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The ignorance of the public is hard to overstate. A Pew Research poll shows that only "19 percent[ ] said tax cuts enacted over the past decade were the major cause" of the runaway growth of the national debt. The general public knows almost nothing about international relations, military strategy, or the national budget. Congress should know better, but is following the lead of the ignorant, and questioning a long-term commitment to reshaping Afghanistan into a modern nation worthy of inclusion in the community of nations.
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If the fools and cowards now in Congress had been in charge of U.S. policy during the Cold War, they would simply have surrendered to the Soviets, Communist Chinese, etc., and there would be no democracy nor free enterpise in this country, which would be just another Soviet satellite.
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It took 44 YEARS for us to win the Cold War. 44 years. We've been in Afghanistan for 10. If we leave Afghanistan now, and it returns to Taliban control, and the Taliban once again tolerates Al-Qaeda training camps on Afghan territory, and another devastating attack on U.S. territory occurs as a consequence, will the fools and cowards who are now flapping their gums going to admit — too late — that they made a terrible mistake?
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Shut up and stay the course. If after 44 years, we haven't managed to drag Afghanistan, kicking and screaming, into the 21st Century, that will be time enuf to withdraw.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,459 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:19 PM