welcome back, don’t unpack

your bivouac’s back in Iraq.US soldiers are screwed

Fark passes on the bad news from Reuters that 300 American soldiers who just last week returned to the US from a year’s tour of duty in Iraq, will be shipped back over to compensate for the short supply of recruits. Nobody wants to wear the red jersey.

About 300 U.S. soldiers who just weeks ago returned home to Alaska after a year in Iraq are being ordered back to try to help bolster security in Baghdad, the U.S. Army said on Monday.

The soldiers are part of the 3,900-strong 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team from Fort Wainwright in Alaska. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on July 27 ordered the unit to remain in Iraq for up to four months past its scheduled departure.

The order provoked anger and disappointment yay?among some of the soldiers’ families in Alaska. It also made clear that any significant reduction in the 135,000-strong U.S. force in Iraq was unlikely in the immediate future.

The brigade was so far along in the process of flowing out of Iraq after its yearlong tour that 380 soldiers had returned home to Alaska and 300 had arrived in Kuwait en route home, the Army said…

Pentagon policy is for Army units to serve 12-month tours in Iraq and Marine Corps units to serve seven-month tours. Army soldiers kept longer than one year in Iraq get an extra $1,000 in pay per month, the Army said…

After some troops and families complained earlier in the war about lack of predictability in the length of tours in Iraq, the Pentagon instituted the rules on deployment duration. This was intended to reduce emotional stress for troops serving in a hostile and unpredictable environment…

The Army said the brigade has not received any assurances it will not be extended even further, but said Rumsfeld would have to approve any such move.

US Soldiers in Iraq

all about alliteration

and maybe a little about a political persecution complex, too.

But can you blame him?

Sploid on T.W.A.T.

Now doesn’t that just sound filthy? Wait till you read it.

Give me liberty or give me a pressure-resistant shelter

Lock Up Everybody!

The monstrous cretin who runs America’s “Homeland Security” is now publicly calling for new fascist laws that would make the Bush Administration’s domestic-spying crimes totally legal.

Michael Chertoff — who many say looks just like an undead version of Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin — says the United States needs more constant surveillance of everybody so he can lock up more “possible terrorists.”

It’s just the latest outrage from an administration desperately trying to turn last week’s phony terrorist scare into justification for more fascist laws before the bogus scare is completely forgotten by Americans.

“It’s not like the 20th century, where you had time to get warrants,” the little totalitarian said Sunday on one of those political talk shows.

“We’ve done a lot in our legal system the last few years, to move in the direction of that kind of efficiency. But we ought to constantly review our legal rules to make sure they’re helping us, not hindering us.”

Chertoff, who presided over the horrific drowning of more than 1,500 citizens in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is very excited about the opportunity to put anybody in jail for no reason at all.

While the White House and the administration’s henchmen in Congress rush to pass new laws that will make everyone a potential terrorist and Halliburton builds the new concentration camps that will soon hold hundreds of thousands of “political prisoners,” Chertoff is pursuing a two-pronged assault on Americans.

First, his goons at airports around the nation are methodically getting Americans “comfortable” with constant fear, harassment and intimidation. Second, his outrageous public statements are intended as a “trial balloon” to see just how much the White House can get away with.

The lack of outrage over Chertoff’s latest insane proclamations will be used as “proof” that the administration can move ahead with the next phase of canceling the “g-ddamned piece of paper” known as the U.S. Constitution.

Proving the “U.K. terror plot” was manufactured fearmongering, U.S. airports have already been told the “threat level” has been reduced to the usual constant hysteria rather than the top-level hysteria enacted last week.

Also revealed this weekend was the fact that the “U.K. terror plot” was just that: Cops encouraging young Muslims to entertain fantasies of striking back at Britain, not the United States.

Remarkably, it was Chertoff himself who admitted this Sunday on CNN.

This kind of gonzo journalism doesn’t come along very often. When it does, you gotta know who it calls to mind. Not only is it absolutely non-objective, thus allowing it to report the facts and the context as they stand, but it’s also deeply sourced, totally jam-packed with links. This is good work.

DWB’s freed

DWB suspectsYes, Driving While Brown is still enough to get you tossed in jail. Oh gosh, what am I saying? It’s getting so bad you could probably get a week in solitary just for a Mystic Tan these days.

Admittedly, these guys were not only driving while brown, they were also transporting cellphones. You know the most popular kind of cellphone? That’s right, the Razr! Razors are like box cutters…and vans and planes are both kinds of transportation…you see where we’re going with this. Do we have to spell it out for you?

From BoingBoing:

Cellphone terror detainees: not guilty, just inconveniently brown

The FBI today said it has no reason to suspect terrorism ties for three Palestinian-American men arrested in Michigan and charged with “collecting or providing materials for terrorist acts and surveillance of a vulnerable target for terrorist purposes.” The men were stopped by authorities after buying 80 pre-paid cellphones at a Wal-Mart. Their van contained nearly a thousand such phones, and the men said they planned to re-sell them at profit. Nearby, in Ohio, a prosecutor today said he lacked evidence to present felony terrorism charges against two more Arab-American men arrested in a similar incident last week over bulk cellphone buys. Link to AP story, via MSNBC (Thanks, Malik Mitchell).

Sploid R.I.P.: let’s not shed a tear

for when they die, we get their stuff.

Yes, Sploid, one of my favorite sites, is no more. Axed. Deep-sixed. Ah, well, I can’t say it any better than they did.

Just like YouTube, Lebanon, Joe Lieberman, newspaper circulation and airline travel, Sploid is being demolished.

It is a great victory for bullshit peddlers everywhere … if they had any idea Sploid existed.

Shut down, laid off, on the nickel, run out of town, shown the door, eighty-sixed, suicided, under heavy manners, finaled by the fuzz, down in the hole, out of the groove, sadder than a map, under the Hoover blankets, taking a bank holiday, riding the rails to Hungry Town, brought down and fought down.

Winners write the history books, but anybody can write the blog post. So get right up close to your computer screen and we’ll tell you a little story…

And so they do, at length, but who cares? More interesting to me is their secret file of Weekend Filler How-To’s, as apparently Denton didn’t want them to play with real news on the weekend, as they might break it. So here’s their secrets to handy-dandy filler, secrets which I intend to carry to my grave.

After posting them here, of course.

This magical world

When in doubt, run a picture of a monkey

Sploid wasn’t just a 24-7 news operation — it was a painstakingly engineered information factory.

While free from the dull tyranny of “Headline News” or “whatever’s on the front page of the New York Times,” Sploid editors nonetheless followed careful instructions formulated by senior editors.

Say it was a Saturday, and nothing was happening in the world except bombs in the Middle East and world leaders dying or lapsing into comas, and maybe the planet was getting hotter or whatever. On those “slow news days,” and even on some exciting days, the editors had to rely on a detailed technical manual with exact instructions for filling the “news hole.”

Following the Sploid Topic List requirements resulted in the following wonders from this magical world we share:

Animal adventures

* Violent deer
* Cat-eating raccoons
* Insidious marmots
* Puppy bombs
* Fainting goats
* Disgraced goats
* Worthless panda bears
* Christmas-ruining possums
* Headless roosters
* Monkey cops

Nation of …

* Foreclosures
* Gangsters
* Murderers
* Retards
* Teenage crack whores
* Witches

Hoboes

* Killed for a beer
* Secretly practicing law
* Rioting
* Talking on cell phones
* Acting righteously
* Roughed up by high schoolers
* Killed by elderly sociopaths
* Suing libraries

Jesus

* Not screwed by Judas
* Appearing in a plate of manicotti
* Appearing in asparagus
* Coming out
* Being blond
* Lacking health insurance
* Probably died hanging upside down like a bat

NASA

* Kills the Ivory Billed Woodpecker
* Launches a non-exploding shuttle
* Enlists the aid of robot lemurs
* Valiantly battles an army of roadkill
* Hits a run of even worse luck than usual
* Bans dangerous foreign 5-year-olds

Other topics of constant concern included robots, monkeys, occult killings, X-rays of humans revealing foreign (and frequently disturbing) objects lodged within, Nazis, dismemberments, frightening conspiracies featuring the Knights Templar and/or Dick Cheney, dumb and/or evil cops, UFOs and the many problems faced by America’s obese citizenry.

We hope you continue to enjoy these timeless tales from our most delightful planet.

Sara K. Smith was Sploid’s bureau chief in Austin and is a novelist, which means she has to get a job now.