Oh shit. I'm tempted to call this "breaking", but since it was first reported on August 7th, it's not exactly new news. What is surprising, however, is that this has not been picked up AT ALL by the American press.

UPDATE: it has, however, been previously diaried by Troutfishing on August 7th. It may be merely routine cycling of ships, as Rogneid suggests. I really, really hope (s)he's right, but I still admit to some trepidation at the fact that the Kuwaitis are worried enough to start emergency plans. Of course the sabre-rattling has been going on for some time, but why hadn't they done so earlier?

This is a PSA for those of you in the CA-13 district. I just got this from Pete Stark's mailing list and it's interesting, though at a time where I'm actively using lots of web-based seminars and various softwares for meetings, this seems a bit old fashioned. But hey! whatever works!

I'm not entirely sure why I'm surprised, but I am. On John McCain's website, they recommend that supporters go to a host of websites, then submit their comments in order to earn points. As you can see from the screenshot, Daily Kos is one of the "featured blogs" johnmccain.com recommends supporters go to to comment. On the right sidebar, visitors can see a selection of blogs categorized "Liberal", "Conservative", "Moderate", and "Other". "Liberal" is the default setting.

Classy.

Finally! The floodgates are opened!!! Feel free to use this as an open thread for those additional SDs who speak out tonight.

I know it seems somewhat quixotic to track these superdelegates when the nomination is clinched, but the more superdelegates who speak out now, the less ammunition Clinton will have when she tries to claim that Obama's lead is somehow surmountable on the floor of Denver.

The Field has this report

Sorry this is such a microdiary, but it was too funny not to post.

Now this is absolutely hilarious! Are there even going to be any advisers LEFT in a week?!?

From CNN:

John McCain’s chief media adviser said Tuesday he is stepping down rather than campaign against Barack Obama.

NY Times had an interesting article this morning about how much more informed children are about the political process. They went into two classrooms at an elementary school in Pennsylvania and talked with the kids and the teachers about their knowledge and interest in the political process. This is rather interesting for a number of reasons, which I'll outline below.

Well color me amused.

According to the fine, intellectual popular culture magazine, Radar, our own Markos Moulitsas is the 7th most hated person on the internet. Wow. That's a lot of internet to be hatin' on you, Kos. So what exactly did Kos do to earn the ire of legions of netizens?

Ugh. I am very much not happy with my Congressman right now. I live in the 13th District of California and Pete Stark still hasn't declared support for either candidate. Alameda County went fairly heavily for Obama in February, though the 13th District as a whole went pretty decisively to Clinton. Because of this, I suspect that my Congressman is a bit torn as to what to do. So I tried to give him a little shove.

Those were the words I heard over and over again during every election season. "A pox on both their houses" would be the grumbled reply from my father as we discussed any number of political topics over the dinner table. That phrase was the distillation of everything that was wrong with American politics - the lies, the backstabbing, the pursuit of power for its own sake.

I grew up with that phrase and it's still with me; disfiguring marks of disgruntlement with Republican and Democratic parties alike.

And so, for the 14 years I've legally been able to vote, I have registered as "Decline to State" (Independent in California terms), violently rejecting the position that a person must, as if it were a football team, choose a party for the sake of the party. But something is starting to change for me.

I've been debating the merits of the Democratic campaigns over on another site and one of the responses went something like this:

And now we are learning the Clintons are attempting to manipulating the delegates from Florida and Michigan that are not supposed to be counted. If that happens, Obama may bolt from the Dem party. He has recently met with Bloomberg. Obama may dump the Dem party and go indie, backed with $1-billion from Bloomberg, and with Bloomberg as the VP. Obama is too new, has no political heavy hitters backing him but that not an issue with Bloombergs purse in hand. You can read about this from (conservative) columnist Armstrong Williams

It should come as no surprise that the RNC is trying to scare dollars out of professed Republicans who do not meet some required level of loyalty. After all, the party has spent years creating bogeymen to fundraise against, so why not go for the jugular and point out that the bogeyman is you?? (ok, ok, and a little help from the Clintons)

TPM posted this scan of an amazingly audacious RNC fundraising letter, in which it highlights how the recipient is not a loyal Republican, complete with a printout of the recipient's voting record and stances on certain social issues (interestingly, as Kossak Stand Strong points out, health care is not one of those issues the RNC cares about).

I have rather mixed views about the war. It's a war that we should never have gone into to begin with (and one I disagreed with even before it started, so fortunately I'm not relying on hindsight for this opinion). It was obvious to many that the point we're at now was inevitable. We have made America more vulnerable, not less, and created a generation of fundamentalist America-haters.

It was with some interest (and no little bit of glee) that I read the cover story of the most recent issue of Newsweek, How N. Korea Changed the Nuclear Club's Rules. It is about North Korea and its path to becoming a nuclear power, but a section is devoted to comparing Clinton's North Korea policies with those of Bush's.

...the North Korean program remained a rather ramshackle affair, demonstrating that it's not so easy after all to build nukes. In the early 1990s, after Washington and Pyongyang nearly came to blows over the program, evangelist Billy Graham and Jimmy Carter went on peacemaking visits to the North, leading to Bill Clinton's "Agreed Framework" deal with Pyongyang. Under that 1994 pact, Clinton obtained a commitment to freeze plutonium reprocessing in exchange for aid and a civilian nuclear plant. When American experts were finally allowed in to inspect Yongbyon, the center of North Korea's nuclear programs, that year, they could hardly believe their eyes. Inside, the cooling pond looked like an abandoned swimming pool.

Wow. Good call from Amanda Marcotte by referencing the Sesame Street children's book, "There Is a Monster at the End of This Book" as a metaphor for the War on Terror.

I was glancing through the NYTimes article about the UN changes the US wants to push through, not noticing anything particularly unusual. I expected to read the usual stuff about Bolton being a bombastic ass whilst trying to push for reforms, yadda yadda. Then I saw a quote that struck me as particularly egregious:

Richard A. Grenell, the spokesman for the United States mission, said, "The fact that we took this document seriously and put it through a thorough interagency process to evaluate its policy implications and then we commented on our ideas should be celebrated, not criticized."

*jaw drop* Aren't we supposed to take these things seriously?? So now we want a pat on the back for doing our jobs??

Of course, given recent history, I suppose we should get a pat on the back for it.