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| ...---... HoldThemAccountable2004.com ...---... |
| 09.30.04 (8:30 pm) [edit] |
[b]On Monday, September 20, The Fight Back Campaign, Inc. (a non-profit corporation) released the first in a series of hard-hitting television ads critical of the Bush Administration's execution of the Iraq war as part of a "Hold Them Accountable 2004" campaign http://www.holdthemaccountabl... . [/b]The ads highlight the terrible cost of the Bush Administration's failures and mistakes in Iraq. The initial media buy place the ads in Wisconsin and West Virginia.
With over 1,000 American lives lost, the Bush Administration acts as if peace is just around the corner, but it is the lack of a real plan to stabilize Iraq that keeps costing American lives. The 30-second TV ad titled "Terrible Mistakes" highlights the terrible cost paid because of the Bush Administration's failure to develop a real plan to stabilize Iraq.
Help us put this ad on the air across the nation, and produce future ads, to raise awareness and attention to the real costs of this Administration's failed policies.
Sign our petition to demand that the debate moderators ask the hard questions in this year's debates. George W. Bush is running on his record. Let's make sure the American people see the entire story: http://www.holdthemaccountabl...
Click here http://www.holdthemaccountabl... to read the Case Against George W. Bush and his Administration.
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| ...---... Debunking the Debates ...---... |
| 09.30.04 (7:16 pm) [edit] |
[b]Conventional wisdom tells us that the three presidential debates, especially the first one tonight, present the best, last chance http://www.nyobserver.com/pag... for John Kerry to reinvigorate his battered campaign. The debate's potential to affect the outcome of a close election cannot be overstated, but the process has become far more scripted than most people think.[/b]
For the first time ever, the highly secretive Commission on Presidential Debates released a 32-page "Memorandum of Understanding," http://www.opendebates.org/ne... hammered out by negotiating teams led by veteran Democratic operative Vernon Jordan and longtime Bush fixer James Baker. Before the spin even kicks in, the Commission aims to manufacture consent, downplay controversy and sidestep direct confrontation. Instead of a true debate, we're likely to witness a ninety-minute interview with the two candidates. It's spectacle, not spontaneity, that counts. Here's a sampling of the more pathetic rules:
- "Neither film footage nor video footage nor any audio excerpts from the debates may be used publicly by either candidate's campaign through any means." Translation: You won't see any Bush screw ups in the next Kerry ad.
- "The candidates may not ask each other direct questions, but may ask rhetorical questions." Translation: Who among us does not love Nascar?
- "At no time during these debates shall either candidate move from their designated area behind their respective podiums." Translation: Kerry looks even more robotic.
- "There will be no TV cutaways to any candidate who is not responding to a question while another candidate is answering a question." Translation: The Commission says they will not enforce this rule. Instead, Fox News is telecasting the first debate for the major news networks, and will not follow outside restrictions. No joke.
Additional rules for second "town-hall" debate:
- "The audience members shall not ask follow-up questions or otherwise participate in the extended discussion, and the audience member's microphone shall be turned off after he or she completes asking the questions." Translation: Candidates can freely dodge all tough questions.
- "Prior to the start of the debate, audience members will be asked to submit their questions in writing to the moderator. The moderator will further review the questions and eliminate any questions that the moderate deems inappropriate." Translation: Few edgy questions about Halliburton, Enron, Osama bin Laden, Abu Ghraib, Fahrenheit 9/11, Bush's National Guard service, the draft, etc, etc.
- "If any audience member poses a question or makes a statement that is in any material way different than the question that the audience member submitted to the moderator for review, the moderator will cut-off the questioner and advise the audience that such non-reviewed questions are not permitted." Translation: Nice try Michael Moore.
- "The debate will take place before a live audience of between 100 and 150 persons who are "soft" Bush supporters or "soft" Kerry supporters." Translation: Forget the independent and undecided swing voters.
- "Gallup shall have responsibility for selecting the nationally demographically representative group of voters." Translation: Gallup's polling this year has consistently oversampled http://www.moveon.org/content... and favored Republicans.
[b]Source:[/b]
Ari Berman, [i]The Daily Outrage[/i], The Nation, http://www.thenation.com
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| ...---... Rate the Debates: 2004 Citizens Debate Scorecard ...---... |
| 09.30.04 (4:39 pm) [edit] |
[b]Thanks to MediaChannel.org and the Tyndall Report viewers of tonight's presidential debate need not be reduced to impotently shaking their fist at their TV screens.[/b] The two organizations have created the Citizens Debate Scorecard http://www.mediachannel.org/d... to allow viewers to respond in real-time to the format of the presidential debate and the performance of the moderator, PBS anchor Jim Lehrer.
[i]Best bit[/i]: the results of the scorecard will be delivered within hours to media outlets, two campaigns and Lehrer himself.
[b]Spin trumps debate performance[/b]
If you are worried about how John Kerry might do in the debates, here's a reminder http://mediamatters.org/items... from Media Matters that it is effective spin not actual performance that determines who is pronounced the victor in the media:
"The day after the first 2000 debate, Hardball host Chris Matthews declared that "I thought he [Gore] cleaned the other guy's clock, and I said so last night, and all four national polls agreed with that," according to a September 29 American Prospect Online article; yet one week later, Matthews replayed footage of Gore's facial expressions and said: "You got to wonder about that facial manipulation. It's so, I don't know, condescending, like he's a teacher talking to the slowest first-graders." Similarly, while The New York Times initially portrayed the first debate as a draw, in the eight days following the debate, four Times news articles, two columns, and one editorial discussed Gore's debate 'sighs.' …
Such a dramatic shift in coverage signaled the success Republicans had in the media in spinning the first debate to their advantage."
[b]Source:[/b]
[i]lakshmi[/i], AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
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| ...---... America's 'Disgraceful' Climate Policy ...---... |
| 09.30.04 (2:29 pm) [edit] |
[b]Today, the Russian Cabinet "approved the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol on combating global warming." [/b]Parliament still needs to vote on the pact but its passage is all but assured after Andrei Illarionov – President Vladimir Putin's top economic adviser, who had been the country's fiercest critic of the pact – announced that "Russia will ratify the international treaty." Russia will join Australia, Germany, Italy, Japan and most other major industrialized nations. Significantly, Russia's participation will put the Kyoto protocol into effect, leaving the United States on the outside looking in.
[b]BLAIR PUSHES FOR ACTION:[/b] British Prime Minister Tony Blair has promised to make global warming "the centerpiece of Britain's residency of the G8 industrialized countries in 2005." Blair emphasized that absent aggressive international action, global warming could become "irreversible in its destructive power." He also noted that while the richest countries contribute most the problem, the poorest countries – such as Haiti – bare the brunt of the problem. In an implicit criticism of the United States, Blair said "the world's richest nations in the G8 have a responsibility to lead the way."
[b]GLOBAL WARMING MAY INCREASE HURRICANE INTENSITY:[/b] Four hurricanes pounded Florida and other states this summer, killing dozens of people and causing billions of dollars in property damage. While it has not been shown that the four hurricanes this summer were the result of global warming, unless the world – especially the United States – acts quickly, the worst is yet to come. A new study, http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/refe... based on comprehensive data analysis using supercomputers, found that, in the coming decades, "global warming is likely to produce a significant increase in the intensity and rainfall of hurricanes." Dr. Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane expert at M.I.T., said the study "clinches the issue" of the link between warming of tropical oceans and storm intensity. Global warming is also expected to raise sea levels, which "would lead to more flooding from hurricanes."
[b]MCCAIN – ADMINISTRATION'S CLIMATE POLICY IS 'DISGRACEFUL':[/b] In the face of growing danger from global warming, President Bush has broken his promise to impose mandatory caps on carbon dioxide emissions – a major cause of global warming – and has withdrawn the United States from the Kyoto Protocol. In 2002, the Bush administration's administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Conrad Lautenbacher, said there was nothing that could be done about rising carbon dioxide levels "unless everyone on Earth goes to sleep for 30 years." Greenwire reported that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) called the administration's global warming policy "disgraceful." McCain added, "any scientists...can tell you there's a lot more that can be done, and the administration is doing very little."
[b]LOTT – LET'S JUST BUILD STRONGER BUILDINGS:[/b] McCain and Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) are co-sponsoring a bill http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin...:SN00139:@@@D&summ2=m& that would "force major energy transportation and manufacturing companies to cut their greenhouse gas emissions to year 2000 levels by 2010." The bill was defeated last October by conservatives in the Senate. Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) told a Greenwire reporter that instead of controlling greenhouse gases, we should just build stronger buildings. Write your Senator http://www.americanprogressac... and tell him or her we must pass the McCain-Lieberman climate bill now.
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| ...---... Cheney his mind ...---... |
| 09.30.04 (11:44 am) [edit] |
[b]Talk about your flip-flops ...[/b]
[i]Quiz:[/i] Who said "(H)ow many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?...And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right... we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."
[i]Answer:[/i] Bush's lifelike VP, Dick Cheney http://seattlepi.nwsource.com... in 1992.
First, it turned out that Cheney had actually voted for http://slate.msn.com/id/20961... many of the same arms reductions that his very own Bush campaign was accusing Kerry of having jeopardized national security to vote for, and now this.
The real test of how potent the discovery of this little nugget of information is: Neither the White House, nor Cheney's office, nor any of it's other hydra heads can even muster some blustery spin about how this was the bizzarro Cheney or the entire thing was a misquote, or that liberals had him at gunpoint or that that was the right plan for then and that changing his mind was the right thing ten years later. It's like a man can't change his mind around here. Geez.
[b]Source:[/b]
[i]Evan[/i], AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
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| ...---... Debates -- A Reminder ...---... |
| 09.29.04 (7:54 pm) [edit] |
[b]In the [i]New York Times[/i], Al Gore reminds America http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... of the last time Mr. Bush stood on stage for a presidential debate:[/b] "If elected, he said, he would support allowing Americans to buy prescription drugs from Canada. He promised that his tax cuts would create millions of new jobs. He vowed to end partisan bickering in Washington. Above all, he pledged that if he put American troops into combat: 'The force must be strong enough so that the mission can be accomplished. And the exit strategy needs to be well defined.'" Check out this American Progress document for more of Bush's broken promises http://www.americanprogressac... .
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| ...---... The State of Iraq's Armed Forces ...---... |
| 09.29.04 (5:27 pm) [edit] |
[b]The State Department regularly issues unclassified reports on Iraq, detailing the status of oil production, upgrades to electrical services, training of the Iraqi military, and a range of other activities.[/b] The most recent issue of the "Iraq Weekly Status Report," dated Sept. 22, includes this table summarizing the state of Iraq's armed forces. The administration often touts the training and equipping of these forces as evidence of progress, but a close look at the numbers reveals that Iraqi forces are far from ready.
Study the following table and helpful highlights from the Center for American Progress http://www.americanprogress.o... :
[b]More Bush lies exposed ... Read also "More Troops To Iraq...After the Election" on http://www.truthout.org/docs_... ...[/b]
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| ...---... How Kerry Can "Win" The Debate ...---... |
| 09.29.04 (4:32 pm) [edit] |
[b]Yes, yes, the debates are style over substance.[/b] Yes, the right wing machine (cable "news," Freepers, and Murdoch's dailies across the nation) will ordain Bush the victor whether he gets in some zingers or chokes on that feisty ice water. But that doesn't mean liberals and progressives should just roll over and complain.
They'd do well to quit assisting and to start preparing a counter-narrative in advance, according to Talking Points Memo http://www.talkingpointsmemo.... .
Repubs are already spreading rumors about Kerry's tan and speculation as to how well he'll withstand the severe lighting.
Atrios http://atrios.blogspot.com/20... counters with this cute, easy picture of the president's likely message (with the joke/lie italicized for easy media pick up):
... "We'll get "happy talk" on Iraq which contradicts reality. We'll get "tough talk" on unnamed terrrorists, despite the fact that Ashcroft hasn't managed to convict any. We'll get "happy talk" on Afghanistan, with Bush doing things like [i]hilariously claiming that the "Taliban is no longer in existence." [/i]We'll probably get some shockingingly unpresidential behavior, including the inappropriate humor he so loves. But, what we probably won't get is anything new. Same shit, different night, as Iraq continues to burn." ...
In the final scene of Ghostbusters, our heroes are told that they are to choose their own demise. Out of their own deepest fears would the enemy be forged. And, hilariously (to my 10 year-old sensibility), that form was the Sta-puft marshmallow man. In Sunday's NY Times style section, one liberal analyst performed the same function.
When asked what to look for in terms of hints, cues, and body language this self-professed Kerry supporter framed the possibilities in terms of iconic actors. Kerry, she said, could come off as a Jimmy Stewart/Henry Fonda type while, she feared, Bush could come off as a commanding Steve McQueen (a charismatic and macho movie star). With Liberals like this who needs a right wing machine?
[b]Source:[/b]
[i]Evan[/i], AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
[b]P.S. Just be youself, John Kerry! Just be yourself![/b]
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| ...---... Stubborness Won't Help ...---... |
| 09.29.04 (2:45 pm) [edit] |
"Stubborness does have its helpful features. You always know what you are going to be thinking tomorrow."
"Better lose the anchor than the entire ship."
[b]The problem with idiot Dubya's "stubborness" is that he avoids the crucial facts on the ground ... To have a leader that[i] drives the ship into the rocks [/i]is just plain stupid ... Bush is too stupid to be president-- We need a change ... We need John Kerry, a smart man, instead of an imbecilic buffoon like Bush ...[/b]
President Bush's ongoing refusal to see reality in Iraq is getting worse each day. Top security experts in and out the administration all agree that the situation in Iraq is getting worse not better. But the president's dismissive attitude toward realists on Iraq continues to hamper security efforts.
[b]. Attacks by insurgents are growing in number and spreading across Iraq.[/b] The New York Times reports today that private security assessments of Iraq, based on military data, show more than 2,300 insurgent attacks against troops and civilians over the last 30 days alone. More importantly, these attacks have occurred all over the country and not merely in isolated provinces as President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi insist.
[b]. The administration's denial about Iraq is making matters worse. [/b] The White House's refusal to listen to sober assessments of Iraq by the CIA, the State Department, and senior military officials is making the insurgents' job easier. Unfortunately, the damage may already be done. As a former intelligence officer states in the Washington Post today, "The best we can hope for is a semi-failed state hobbling along with terrorists and a succession of weak governments."
[b]. President Bush's stubbornness has failed to stop the insurgency and create a stable state in Iraq.[/b] It is high time Americans got some hard-nosed realism about the security threats we face. There are serious consequences for the administration's ongoing strategic mistakes. And the White House should stop acting like a cheerleading squad for failed policies.
[b]Sources:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
The Facade Has Fallen, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ...---... Distorting the Horse Race ...---... |
| 09.29.04 (1:17 pm) [edit] |
[b]Media coverage of the presidential horse race – a story that, since the media insists on devoting so much coverage to it, unfortunately ends up influencing how people view the candidates – is being distorted by inaccurate and irresponsible polling by the Gallup organization.[/b] Gallup has consistently reported much larger nationwide leads for Bush than all other polls. There are two primary reasons: 1) Gallup's sample routinely includes far more Republicans than are in the electorate, 2) Gallup uses a fundamentally flawed system to identify "likely voters." As a result, suspect large leads for Bush reported by the Gallup organization draw attention away from critical policy issues and to endless speculation about what Bush is doing right and Sen. Kerry is doing wrong.
[b]GALLUP OVER-SAMPLES REPUBLICANS:[/b] In 2000, exit polls showed that Democratic turnout exceeded Republican turnout by four percentage points. In 1996, Democratic turnout was five percentage points greater. There were also more Democrats voting in 1992 and 1988. A study by the Pew Research Center found that party registration is about the same as in 2000. But Gallup's most recent survey of 1,006 registered voters included 40 percent Republicans and 31 percent Democrats. Not surprisingly, the same survey showed Bush with a 13-point lead. Meanwhile polls by Investor's Business Daily, Zogby, and George Washington University conducted in the same week showed the presidential race in a statistical dead heat http://www.pollingreport.com/... .
[b]GALLUP USES BOGUS LIKELY VOTER MODEL:[/b] Gallup also reports results for "likely voters." What is a Gallup likely voter? Gallup asks a series of seven questions. For example: Do you happen to know where people who live in your neighborhood go to vote? Also: Have you ever voted in your precinct or election district? Gallup then gives higher weight to registered voters who answer yes to these questions. Instead of predicting who is likely to show up at the polls, Gallup's methodology systematically undervalues young voters, transient voters, immigrant voters and other groups likely to vote democratic. Not surprisingly, a recent Gallup poll of likely voters showed Bush witha 14-point lead. Headline blazed across the country: Poll Finds Bush Lead Surging Among Likely Voters. Meanwhile, excluding Gallup, 14 national polls of likely voters released in the last two weeks show Bush with an average lead of about 3 percent. In an interview with CNN, Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport ignored the data, and inaccurately claimed "most observers now say it's a six to eight-point lead. That's what recent polls are showing."
[b]GALLUP INSULTS CRITICS:[/b] Newport told USA Today that critics of Gallup's methods "don't understand the science behind the polls." But respected pollster John Zogby – who understands the science as well as anyone – disagrees with Gallup's methods. Specifically, Zogby says that "there are variations in people's party affiliations, but they aren't changing much daily, weekly or even monthly." American Progress Senior Fellow and polling expert Ruy Teixeira says, "Frank Newport at Gallup insists this is a 'scientific' approach to take to polling. Sounds more like dogma to me." For a daily dose of the truth behind the polling number's check out Teixeira's blog http://www.emergingdemocratic... .
[b]MORE REPUBLICAN POLLSTER BIAS:[/b] Gallup is not alone is skewing polling data to the advantage of Republicans. MSNBC has regularly included Republican pollster Frank Luntz – without mentioning his partisan ties – in its election coverage. Luntz has freely admitted he skews data to match his viewpoint. He once said "Say you poll on an environmental issue, and on eight of the 10 questions the numbers are in your favor. Why release the other two?" In 1997, he was reprimanded for his unethical conduct "by the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) for his work polling for the Republican Party's 1994 'Contract with America.'" Media Matters for America has written a letter to MSNBC http://mediamatters.org/items... asking that Luntz not be included in coverage or, at the very least, properly identified as a partisan Republican. Tell MSNBC mailto:viewerservices@msn bc.com and Luntz http://www.luntz.com/contactu... what you think.
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| ...---... The Post-Debate Debate ...---... |
| 09.28.04 (1:55 pm) [edit] |
[b]Paul Krugman today touches http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... on a crucially important point about Thursday night's presidential debate.[/b] If 2000 was any indication -- and there's every reason to think it is -- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... the winner of the debate won't be determined during the 90 minute encounter itself but during the spin war that will follow it. And with the advantage the Republicans have on the cable nets, talk radio and chat TV shows, the odds are stacked in their favor.
(As Krugman alludes to, the initial public reactions to the first Bush/Gore debate had the then-veep coming out on top, if narrowly. It was only after several days of pundit churn that Bush became the winner. The Bush team won the post-debate debate.)
More than just these built-in advantages, though, Democrats, I think, have seldom really appreciated that there is such a thing as a post-debate debate. I don't mean that they don't know about putting out surrogates or trying to spin the results. Of course, they do. But in 2000 at least (a certainly in analogous situations in this cycle) the effort was very reactive and scattershot. And that inevitably leaves the Democrats trying to parry or deconstruct the ways that Republicans are trying to define what happened. In that way, they're fighting at best for a draw.
Republicans are already leaking hints and taunts about whether Kerry will sweat profusely under the lights, whether he's too tanned and other similar nonsense. But the antic nature of these taunts doesn't mean they won't be effective. They're meant to throw the other side off balance and, in a related manner, to provide grist for a catty and frivolous press corps.
So what's the Democrats' plan going into this debate? You can see what the other side is planning from visiting Drudge or listening to the GOP surrogates on the chat shows.
But what do the Dems have in mind?
It's easy to predict that there will be several exchanges in the debate where the president will describe the situation in Iraq in ways that are entirely belied by the reality of the situation. Perhaps he'll mention the situation in Fallujah where his intervention in the battle planning had such disastrous and feckless results. Will the pundits and talking heads be primed for those moments? Or only for Kerry's moments of over-fancy rhetoric?
Will the Dems be ready to hit on these issues and focus the post-debate debate on the president's recklessness, lack of a plan and inability to level with the public about what's happening in Iraq?
There are many other possible examples. But the point is that we have a pretty good idea what the president is going to say. And what he'll almost certainly say will open up a number of solid lines of attack. But if the Democrats don't hit the ground running with a plan in mind they'll be overwhelmed by the GOP spin machine -- no matter how many fibs the president tells or how many times he says up is down.
[b]Source:[/b]
Joshua Micah Marshall, TalkingPointsMemo, http://www.talkingpointsmemo....
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| ...---... O'Reilly vs. Stewart ...---... |
| 09.28.04 (12:07 pm) [edit] |
"I mean, you've got stoned slackers watching your dopey show every night…you know the research on your program."
- Bill O'Reilly, 9/17/04, http://www.wonkette.com/archi...
[i]VERSUS[/i]
"Viewers of Jon Stewart's show are more likely to have completed four years of college than people who watch 'The O'Reilly Factor,' according to Nielsen Media Research."
- AP, 9/27/04, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6...
[b]Why am I not surprised that mediocre minds and brain-dead sheep 'buy' Karl Rove's mendacious neo-fascist propaganda 'hook-line-and-sinker'? ... O'Reilly is a hypocritical blowhard who sucks up to the corrupt neo-con Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i], while having avoided serving http://www.tblog.com/template... in the armed services himself-- His brats don't serve our nation either ... [i]Hmmm[/i] ...[/b]
Refer to [b]"Recognizing Who Served & Who Did Not Serve"[/b] on http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ...---... They Didn't Do It Alone ...---... |
| 09.28.04 (8:13 am) [edit] |
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent." - John Donne
"America is rapidly losing its dominate position in the world economy as jobs move elsewhere and Americans lose faith in the moral leadership of the business community." - Howard Dean, http://www.yubanet.com/artman...
[b]Forbes 400 Richest Americans: They Didn't Do It Alone; Private Wealth Counts on Public Investment, Infrastructure [/b]
According to the just- released Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, 39 percent inherited at least some of their wealth and "the rest have self- made fortunes." In fact, says Responsible Wealth, everyone on the Forbes 400 owes their wealth partly to a taxpayer-financed inheritance of public research and contracts; public schools and universities; communications, transportation and other critical infrastructure, and myriad government institutions from the Federal Reserve and the courts to the Treasury, Defense and Commerce Departments.
"It takes a village to raise a billionaire. Every taxpayer deserves some credit for Forbes 400 wealth," says Mike Lapham, co- director of Responsible Wealth. "Yet while the Forbes 400 richest Americans are doing better this year -- their collective wealth rose $45 billion since 2003 -- the average taxpayer is not. Median household income fell for the fourth year in a row last year."
"Self-serving stories of 'self-made' success may nourish the ego, but they mask the real ingredients of wealth creation and a strong economy. Where would the Forbes 400 be without public investment and infrastructure-from Google founders building on the Internet to Ross Perot and government contracts?" said Chuck Collins, co-founder of Responsible Wealth.
Billionaires Warren Buffett, Ross Perot and Google's Larry Page illustrate the myth of the "self-made" label. They are all featured in Responsible Wealth's report, "I Didn't Do It Alone: Society's Contribution to Individual Wealth and Success."
Warren Buffett, No. 2 on the Forbes 400, attended a publicly supported state school, the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, and is quite clear that his investment wealth depends on America's social and economic infrastructure. "I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned," said Buffett. "I happen to work in a market system that happens to reward what I do very well -- disproportionately well."
Larry Page, No. 43 on the Forbes 400, co-founded Google, which went public this year. Page graduated from a state school, the University of Michigan, and then attended Stanford University for graduate work, where Google was born. Government grants underpin the lucrative research in Silicon Valley and at Stanford University. The Internet platform, without which Google would not exist, is built on a foundation of taxpayer-funded research and development.
H. Ross Perot, Jr, No. 40 on the Forbes 400, grew his company Electronic Data Systems (later sold to General Motors) by focusing on computer systems and services for Medicare, a government program. The company's growth -- and windfall profits -- really took off when it began reselling the Medicare claims processing system it had developed for Texas Blue Cross under a research and development contract paid for by federal funds.
"Some Forbes 400 billionaires want to pull up the ladder behind them," says Scott Klinger, co-director of Responsible Wealth. "They received government help, but don't want anyone else to. The myth of self-made wealth is used to justify tax cuts for the rich and reduce public investment in the very institutions and infrastructure that not only enable more Americans to become wealthy, but are crucial to a strong and growing economy."
Responsible Wealth's report, "I Didn't Do It Alone: Society's Contribution to Individual Wealth and Success," co-authored by Chuck Collins, Mike Lapham and Scott Klinger, spotlights successful entrepreneurs who credit society's investment in their success.
Jim Sherblom, a venture capitalist and former chief financial officer of the biotech firm, Genzyme, observed in the report, "The opportunities to create wealth are all taking advantage of public goods -- like roads, transportation, markets -- and public investments. None of us can claim it was all personal initiative. A piece of it was built upon this infrastructure that we all have this inherent moral obligation to keep intact."
The report concludes that if society's role in wealth creation withers from inadequate revenues and political will, then opportunities for wealth and innovation will shrink. Entrepreneurism, the economy and society will all be undermined.
"I Didn't Do It Alone" is available on the Web at http://www.responsiblewealth.... .
Responsible Wealth is a national network of business people and affluent Americans concerned about deepening economic inequality who advocate for widespread prosperity.
[b]CONTACT:[/b] Responsible Wealth, http://www.responsiblewealth....
Bob Keener of Responsible Wealth, 617-610-6766
Read also [b]"The Myth of Corporate Accountability"[/b] by Howard Dean on http://www.yubanet.com/artman...
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| ...---... Dissent is Patriotic ...---... |
| 09.27.04 (2:51 pm) [edit] |
[b]If there was any lingering doubt that this President rules by sowing division and fear it has been put to rest in these last weeks.[/b] As Dana Milbank's chilling front-page story http://www.washingtonpost.com... in last Friday's [i]Washington Post [/i]details, Bush and leading Republicans dare to argue that a vote for John Kerry is a vote for Al Qaeda.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert says he believes Al Qaeda would prefer a Kerry presidency. GOP Senate candidate John Thune of South Dakota says that his opponent, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle's mild criticism of the war "embolden the enemy" and bring "comfort to America's enemies." Darth Vader VP Cheney strongly suggested that America would be more likely to be attacked if Kerry were elected.
These are Republicans who breed a culture of fundamentalism and intolerance, who betray the guiding and founding values of America. If a truly great Republican--Theodore Roosevelt--were among us today, he would expose the despicable politics of these fifth-rate offspring of the Grand Old Party and tell them--as he told the nation in 1918:
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
**********
And Then There Are True Conservatives...
Speaking of sane Republicans, did you see that Senator Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) has made it known that he may not vote for Bush? Last weekend, according to the [i]Washington Post[/i], Chafee told a science seminar in his home state that he would vote for a Republican but not George W., who he has differed with on many issues including tax cuts, the Iraq war and stem cell research.
And let's hope a small item in Saturday's [i]New York Times[/i] signals a trend: One of West Virginia's five electors says he may withhold his electoral college vote for Bush even if the President wins in the increasingly important swing state. Elector Richie Robb, the mayor of South Charleston, is incensed about the war in Iraq and painful layoffs in his town.
And by the way, do Bush and Co. believe that conservatives like John McCain, Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar--who have been all over the airwaves arguing that the US is in deep trouble in Iraq--are aiding and abetting the enemy? And what about the discontent with the commander-in chief from within the military itself? According to a [i]Christian Science Monitor [/i]story, there is a "discernible countercurrent among US troops in Iraq--those who blame President Bush for entangling them in what they see as a misguided war." Will chickenhawk Cheney blast these soldiers in the field as unpatriotic.
[b]Source:[/b]
Katrina vanden Heuvel, [i]Editor's Cut[/i], TheNation, http://www.thenation.com
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| ...---... Ron Reagan Jr. Warns Bush: "Stop Hijacking My Father's Reputation" ...---... |
| 09.27.04 (11:36 am) [edit] |
[b]In an exclusive interview, the son of the Gipper brands the current Republican leader an opportunist and a cheat.[/b]
He's a hypocrite. He "plays farm" on his ranch. He cheated to get to the White House. He lied about Iraq, and used national grief from September 11 to his own advantage.
Those are the kind of criticisms the left has levelled at President Bush for months, but just 37 days before the election, those accusations are coming from Ron Reagan - the son of one of America's most revered Republican presidents.
In an exclusive interview, Reagan has spoken frankly to the Sunday Herald about his anger and deep resentment of the Bush administration for "hijacking" his father's legacy through the campaign.
Ronald Reagan, who was president between 1981 and 1989, died, aged 93, in June after a 10-year battle with Alzheimer's disease. George W Bush's father, George, served as Reagan's vice-president.
The present Bush team have recruited several of Reagan's presidential aides and speechwriters to the 2004 campaign. But Ron Reagan accused Bush of trying to re-invent himself in the mould of his father, who was near-idolised in the US as an immensely strong president in the face of the cold-war threat.
Reagan said: "This administration will use whatever they can - they will try to hijack that legacy, they will pretend that Mr Bush is the reincarnation of my father. I don't feel terribly happy about that; I certainly don't remember Bush being at any Thanksgiving dinners.
" I don't know Mr Bush well, but from what I can gather, he's nothing like my father as a man."
Ironically, Reagan says he sometimes finds Bush "amusing, when you see pictures of him on his ranch with his little chainsaw as if he actually does any work there".
Reagan, a broadcaster and writer, told the Sunday Herald that he is determined to speak out about the tactics of the Bush administration in this election campaign - especially when viewed against the struggle of the 2000 result.
He said: "The reality of this administration is so ugly that most Americans, even those who are more or less opposed to the administration, really don't want to come to grips with that.
"This is an administration that has cheated to get into the White House. It's not something Americans ever want to think about their government. My sense of these people is that they don't have any respect for the public at large. They have a revolutionary mindset. I think they feel that anything they can do to prevail - lie, cheat, whatever - is justified by their revolutionary aims."
Although confirming he has no ambition to stand for political office himself, Reagan admitted that his address to the Democratic convention in July raised eyebrows, not least with his family.
"I wouldn't want to be a politician, because politicians are constrained in what they can say. My mother probably gets a little nervous if I'm too rough on George Bush - I mean, she has to speak to these people every once in a while. But she knows I have to speak my conscience."
His conscience drives Reagan to campaign on a single, personal issue - stem cell research.
The Bush administration is firmly against it, so stem cell research receives just $25 million in federal funding and has evolved into a political hot potato . Reagan's convention speech received a standing ovation, in tune with public opinion that shows three quarters of Americans favour more stem cell research. But Republicans and the Christian right (a considerable voting force in the US) continue to brand it immoral and equate it with abortion .
"This is an issue that has become extremely divisive in American society," he said. "They always say a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged - well, I wonder how they would feel if a child or a loved one developed diabetes or Parkinson's, and then see where they lie on the debate. Most people have no difficulty in choosing between a petri dish and a human being."
Even the first lady Laura Bush has been tasked with opposing it - despite her own father dying, like Reagan Sr, after a lengthy struggle with Alzheimer's . She stated last month: "To hear people say that a cure for Alzheimer's is at our fingertips is just not right."
Reagan has a sharp reply to her assertion. "If Laura Bush went back and did her homework, she would see that nobody thinks there is a cure around the corner for Alzheimer's.
"Diabetes, Parkinson's and spinal injuries will come first in the search for therapies. It was thought that stem cell research would help Alzheimer's, but it's clear other things will come first. Mrs Bush was either uninformed or disingenuous in her comments, but perhaps, with federal funding, we could address the issue properly."
In the run-up to polling day on November 2, Reagan will be keeping an eye on the three key television debates pitting Kerry against Bush in front of the nation for the first time.
Reagan is quietly hopeful of a Kerry comeback , but is realistic about the impact the media has on the campaign. "Kerry has made a slight comeback in the polls, but it doesn't really matter how many people watch the debates. When Gore and Bush debated four years ago, Gore did a better job, but the press focused on his mannerisms and his make-up and ignored Bush's lies. The American media is not healthy.
"I do think Kerry has an uphill battle on his hands, and it's of his own making. He made a huge mistake in saying: 'If we knew what we know now, we would not have gone to war.' He should have come out forcefully and said he made a mistake about the war in the first instance."
The war in Iraq, and the Bush administration's attitude after September 11, are viewed by Reagan as "terrible".
"September 11 was a huge opportunity for the Bush administration. When you read accounts of insiders who were close to the top of the administration on September 11, it's shocking. Within hours of this terrible atrocity they were looking for opportunities to take advantage of it. They turned it into a situation where they could attack Saddam, who had nothing to do with September 11. This wasn't a wake-up call for them."
In a recent book called Five Minutes With The President, for which Reagan wrote the foreword, he called on Bush to look into his heart and ask what kind of Christian he really is. He told the Sunday Herald that he would like to hammer home to Bush the consequences of his actions.
"I would ask him whether he felt that the innocent Iraqis and Afghans who died under our bombs were going to heaven as he imagines it. I think the answer to that would be very telling about Mr Bush's character and his outlook on the world."
Reagan lives with a constant legacy of his father - in name, but also in his strong sense of right and wrong . The world-wide grief and mourning for his father is something he found "gratifying ".
Despite being at opposite ends of the political spectrum, does he think his father would have been proud of him?
"I hope my father would be proud. All I'm trying to do is lend my name and voice to what I see as an unaligned good cause. I hope that he would be supportive of that. I have no reason to believe that he wouldn't be."
[b]Ron Reagan Jr. is no fool: He sees through the phony-baloney Bush like alot of the rest of us ...[/b]
[b]Source:[/b]
By Jenifer Johnston, The Sunday Herald, http://www.sundayherald.com/4...
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| ...---... No More Debate On Debates ...---... |
| 09.27.04 (8:39 am) [edit] |
"Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent, and debate." - Hubert H. Humphrey
"It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle it without debate." - Joseph Joubert
"It's a moral issue. The German theologian Bonhoeffer said, "The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children." Now we're leaving our kids unthinkable taxes and debts and so forth." - Pete Peterson [This issue http://www.pbs.org/now/politi... should be[i] debated [/i]...]
[b]Debates [i]matter[/i] http://www.opendebates.org ... Unhappily, "We the People" are not going to get the [i]real[/i] debates between Bush and Kerry http://www.pbs.org/now/politi... that we deserve as citizens of a democratic society ... The presidential debates are purposely engineered[i] to avoid [/i]the very kind of combative discourse necessary for us to see the real candidates (unscripted) and their viewpoints (expressed spontaneously) ... Therefore, Americans [i]must read and read a great deal [/i]in order to uncover the truth and vote intelligently on the 2nd November ...[/b]
After a week of negotiation, the Bush and Kerry campaigns finally agreed to terms for the upcoming presidential debates. Despite earlier Republican posturing about limiting the number of discussions, the four dates proposed by the Commission on Presidential Debates – three presidential debates and one vice-presidential – were all accepted, with the first Bush/Kerry matchup taking place Sept. 30 at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla.
While the Kerry camp prevailed on the number of debates, negotiator (and longtime Bush family ally) James Baker managed to get most of the president’s other demands met.
Baker and Democratic negotiator Vernon Jordan announced the agreed-upon schedule http://news.yahoo.com/news?tm... Monday evening. After next week’s Florida meeting, Kerry and Bush will square off at Washington University in St. Louis Oct. 8, and at Arizona State University in Tempe on Oct. 13. Meanwhile, Dick Cheney and John Edwards will debate at Ohio’s Case Western University on Oct. 5.
That’s the same debate schedule proposed by the bi-partisan Commission and and accepted by Kerry http://washingtontimes.com/up... in July. But by the time Baker was done negotiating, little beyond the times, locations and moderators http://news.yahoo.com/news?tm... (Jim Lehrer, Charles Gibson, Bob Schieffer and Gwen Ifill) remained unchanged.
Originally, the first debate was supposed to focus on domestic issues and the economy, with the third devoted to foreign policy. Instead, those have been flipped http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... . As the[i] New York Times [/i]explains, the first debate tends to draw the most viewers, and the Bush campaign wanted that larger audience to see a discussion of foreign policy (which it views as its candidate’s strength) instead of economic issues where Kerry performs better in polls.
Bush got his way again with the second, "town hall" debate. As the [i]Boston Globe [/i]noted, this was the debate the Bush campaign had threatened to skip:
... "The biggest question mark had been the middle presidential debate, which could put Bush in the unusual position of facing questions from critics. Bush campaign aides had been reluctant to agree to the St. Louis debate, but with the president commanding a solid lead in many polls, especially in Missouri, they decided it did not present much risk." ...
As a result of negotiation, though, the audience for that debate will no longer comprise undecided voters. Instead, it will feature a crowd split between "soft" Kerry supporters and Bush supporters, from whom Gibson will select questions. The thinking, apparently, is that undecideds would be more likely to grill the incumbent, while a group of "soft" bipartisans would more evenly distribute the tough questions.
The agreement between the campaigns also set the guidelines for everything from makeup (each candidate gets to provide his own makeup person) to the type of table behind which Edwards and Cheney will sit (constructed "according to the style and specifications proposed by the commission in consultation with each campaign"). As the [i]Globe[/i] notes:
... "Governing items large and small, the agreement specifies such things as a stipulation that no crowd shots should be aired during the answers, cameras cannot show the opposing candidate's reactions while the other is speaking, and that Bush and Kerry, as well as Cheney and Edwards, must shake hands at the outset of each debate.
"’Each candidate may move about in a predesignated area ... and may not leave that area while debate is underway,’" says the agreement, evoking images of Al Gore approaching Bush -- much to the then-Texas governor's surprise -- during the 2000 campaign. ‘The chairs will be swivel chairs that can be locked in place and shall be of equal height,’ it adds, a concern of the Bush campaign as the 6-foot president faces off against the 6-foot-4-inch Massachusetts senator." ...
Now that such minutiae have been agreed upon in a 32-page document, both campaigns have begun the game of lowering expectations. As the [i]New York Daily News [/i]notes http://www.nydailynews.com/ne... :
... "Bush and Kerry both want the millions of voters who will watch the first debate on Sept. 30 from Coral Gables, Fla., to believe he's pathetically outclassed.
"That's why Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart, in the finest tradition of Clintonian excess, could maintain with a straight face that President Bush has never lost a debate. Or why chief Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd, normally the essence of sobriety, could recently declare: ‘John Kerry is the greatest debater since Cicero.’" ...
How the expectations game will play out – and whether the debates will effectively change the race’s dynamics – remain to be seen. But at least voters now know when they’ll find out.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Jeff Fleischer, Mother Jones, http://www.motherjones.com/ne...
Do Debates Matter?, http://www.pbs.org/now/politi...
The History of Presidential Debates: Before Television, http://www.pbs.org/now/politi...
The History of Presidential Debates: The Televised Years, http://www.pbs.org/now/politi...
Open Debates, http://www.opendebates.org
[b]Courtesy of WinstonSmith http://winstonsmith.tblog.com... [/b]
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| ...---... Why Wait? Here's a Pre-Debate Quiz ...---... |
| 09.27.04 (8:38 am) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" are faced with the most important presidential election in a generation ... However, the following light-hearted [i]food-for-thought [/i]is worth pondering before Thursday night's "debate" http://www.tblog.com/template... ...
Instructions for candidates:[/b] Pretend each question is coming from Jim Lehrer, the moderator of the debate, and choose the one answer most likely to please swing voters watching on television on Thursday night. Do not assume that voters want to hear your innermost feelings, let alone the truth.
[b]Instructions for noncandidates:[/b] Some of the answers, right and wrong, are remarks (either verbatim or slightly abridged) made by the candidate in speeches, interviews and news conferences. See how many real quotations you can spot.
[b]Bush Questions[/b]
1. President Bush, you and Mr. Kerry have both been criticized for your conduct during the Vietnam War. Which one of you served his country better?
a) Some have questioned Senator Kerry's decision to take a jaunt halfway around the world to Vietnam, leaving our border with Mexico defended only by my small band of brothers in the Texas National Guard. But I will not stoop to criticizing any man's service.
b) I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes.
c) Well, Dan - excuse me, Jim I've already answered the critics of my Guard record by releasing documents that were actually typed on typewriters. But I do want to thank all your colleagues, and the Democrats, for spending so much time on these questions. Beats questions on Iraq.
d) My opponent has said that Vietnam veterans have a motto, "Every day is extra." That's just how we looked on our service in the Guard. And it just so happened that at that point in my life, my schedule didn't have any extra days.
e) I think we agree, the past is over.
2. What was your biggest foreign-policy mistake as president?
a) Hmmm. I wish you'd have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it. I'm sure historians will look back and say, Gosh, he could have done it better this way or that way. I'm sure something will pop into my head here, but it hadn't yet. You just put me under the spot here and maybe I'm not quick, as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.
b) Well, I guess it's what I said to Karl Rove yesterday, when we were talking about sending the neocons back to their think tanks. If we'd stayed out of Iraq, we'd be up 20 points in the polls.
c) That "Mission Accomplished" banner. Or maybe the flight suit.
d) I'm starting to wonder if we were wrong about those W.M.D.'s.
e) We overestimated how long it would take to defeat Saddam's army, but we underestimated how long some of them would go on fighting as insurgents.
3. When Senator Kerry was your daughters' age, he volunteered to go to Vietnam. Did you ever encourage them to volunteer for Iraq?
a) As Dick Cheney says, they had other priorities, like that Vogue story.
b) I don't think people ought to be compelled to make the decision which they think is best for their family.
c) We don't need any more problems in Iraq, thank you.
d) It did cross my mind after their speech at the convention.
e) I don't believe in telling children what career to pick, but I would be proud if they enlisted.
4. Mr. President, can you name the commonly used term for the inhabitants of any of these countries: Greece, East Timor, Sweden, Kosovo and France?
a) Grecians
b) East Timorians
c) Swedenese
d) Kosovians
e) I just call them all good friends of America, except the Francians.
[b]Kerry Questions [/b]
1. Senator Kerry, you have been described by the Bush campaign as the greatest debater since Cicero. Does that give you an edge tonight?
a) I would have said Demosthenes.
b) There he goes again with the misunderestimation game.
c) I can't make a fair judgment, since I've read Cicero only in the Italian translation - you lose so much from the Latin. But I do have a special admiration for one of his arguments: "No well-informed person ever imputed inconsistency to another for changing his mind."
d) I'm just hoping to do better than Al Gore.
e) The president has won every debate he's ever had.
2. Senator Kerry, you say you have a better plan for winning the war in Iraq and the war on terror. But what specifically would you do differently?
a) Convene a summit meeting of the world's major powers and of Iraqis' neighbors.
b) Personally issue a multilingual invitation to the leaders of France, Germany and the Trilateral Commission to convene in the inner sanctum of Skull and Bones. Over foie gras and a robust riesling.
c) The final victory in the war on terror depends on a victory in the war of ideas, much more than the war on the battlefield. And the war - not the war, I don't want to use that terminology. The engagement of economies, the economic transformation, the transformation to modernity of a whole bunch of countries that have been avoiding the future.
d) Same thing we did in Nam - declare victory and bring the troops home.
e) George Bush has not told the truth to the American people about why we went to war and how the war is going. I will.
3. You now call the Iraq war a mistake. Yet you say that, even knowing what we know now, you would still have voted to authorize it. How does that make sense?
a) It was the correct vote because we needed to hold Saddam Hussein accountable for weapons.
b) I actually voted against the first gulf war before I voted for this one.
c) The vote for authorization is interpreted by a lot of people as a vote to go to war. But if you read it, and if you think about what it gave the president, it gave the president what he said: "America will speak with one voice.''
d) Look, I never liked this war, but I figured it was political suicide to vote against it, and then I was afraid it would sound like a flip-flop if I changed my mind. Makes perfect sense.
e) My vote was a vote to do this the right way. And the president, every step of the way, has chosen the wrong way.
4. Do you now consider your public display of windsurfing off Nantucket to be a faux pas?
a) Faux pas? Non, au contraire. C'etait magnifique! J'ai donné l'image d'homme très fort et très sportif! Et Monsieur Bush, il est un wuss!
b) I was just trying to look like J.F.K. without the yacht.
c) Who among us does not love windsurfing?
d) Teresa said spandex is a hot look for me.
e) Faux pas? What does that mean?
[b]Answers[/b]
For all questions: [i]e. (If either candidate didn't figure that out by now, he may want to develop laryngitis before Thursday.)[/i]
Bush actual quotes: [i]1:b, e; 2:a; 3:b; 4:a, b, d.[/i]
Kerry actual quotes: [i]1:e; 2:a, c, e; 3:a, c, e; 4:e. ("What does that mean?" was uttered by Mr. Kerry on his way into a bistro after a reporter wished him, "Bon appetit.")[/i]
[b]Sources:[/b]
No More Debate On Debates, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Why Wait? Here's a Pre-Debate Quiz, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
Expert Advises Bush Dumb-Down-Diction for Thursday's Debate, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
[b]Courtesy of WinstonSmith http://winstonsmith.tblog.com... [/b]
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| ...---... Deficient Deficit Debate ...---... |
| 09.26.04 (11:34 am) [edit] |
[b]We need a debate on deficits, not party dogma.[/b]
The U.S. Congressional Budget Office has just reported that this year's budget deficit will reach a record-breaking $422 billion in 2004. Predictably, Democrats accuse the Bush administration of gross mismanagement and, just as predictably, the White House says there is nothing to worry about because the economy is beginning to recover. Who is correct?
Whether a deficit is a problem depends on how far the economy is from its full productive capacity, whether future deficits are likely to grow or shrink as the economy moves toward full capacity, and the likely effect of taxes and spending on the growth of that productive capacity over the long term. By this real-world test, the deficits accumulated over the past four years are nothing to worry about because the U.S. economy has had lots of spare capacity. But beware the future.
A central purpose of fiscal policy is to complement monetary policy in making full use of the nation's productive capacities. As John Maynard Keynes well understood, this may require running deficits when neither consumer nor business spending is adequate to the task of maintaining adequate aggregate demand for all the goods and services that can be produced. Bush and company have denied they're Keynesians and would like to credit the Bush tax cuts alone for keeping the economy going through difficult times. But the fact is, it was the combination of the tax cuts and extra spending on the military and other discretionary items, plus the Federal Reserve's expansionary monetary policy, that has got us out of the soup.
But only just. America still has a lot of spare capacity, which is something neither Republicans who want to brag about a vigorous recovery nor Democrats who want to tut-tut over this year's budget deficit will fully admit. Payroll jobs grew by some 350,000 over the last three months, while the population of eligible workers has grown by at least 450,000. The nation still has a record number of long-term unemployed. Much factory and office space is still up for grabs. It's safe to assume lots of extra capacity for another year or two, at least until American consumers have paid down more of their personal debts and have more money to spend, and until businesses feel demand heating up enough that they want to invest in new inventories and upgrade their technologies and facilities. In the meantime, it's perfectly appropriate for government deficits to take up some of the slack.
But some time after that, the U.S. is likely to hit a capacity wall. This is when the tax cuts and spending programs that are more or less locked into future budgets will create a lot of mischief because they bang straight into that wall. Put simply, the nation just won't have the productive capacity to do everything government, consumers, and businesses want to do. With demand outstripping capacity to meet it, prices will be bid upward, including that of capital. If we're not careful, we could be back in the soup.
Democrats are right to emphasize this danger, and point out that the only way Bush can do all the things he says he wants to do over the long term -- make his tax cuts permanent, provide continued relief from the Alternative Minimum Tax, pay for his ten-year $530 billion Medicare drug benefit, offer a new health insurance tax credit, and continue to fight a war against terrorism that may or may not ever be winnable -- while cutting the deficit in half, is to make scathing cuts in everything else the government does. But this prompts the more basic question of how big a deficit America should aim to have. The answer depends, in part, on what happens over time to the nation's productive capacity.
Look beyond the business cycle and what do you see? Deficit hawks see the specter of 77 million baby boomers being let down by bankrupt Social Security and Medicare systems as the rest of the economy sinks under the dead weight of massive debt. Alan Greenspan recently told Congress it can't count on increases in the nation's productive capacity to finance the boomers' retirements. But why not? If America's capacity expands substantially, it can do that and much more. The question is how much the nation is likely to invest in order to build such capacity.
Republican supply-siders have told us for years that tax cuts alone will generate enough private investment to grow the economy, and that growth will dwarf the budget deficits which the tax cuts contributed to. So far, their prediction remains only a prediction. Based on the records of the Reagan administration and that of George W. Bush so far, I have my doubts. But there's another case to be made on the other side of the political aisle, by what we might call liberal supply-siders. It is that public investments in education, job training, infrastructure, and basic research and development would more than pay for themselves as they spurred growth of the nation's productive capacity. Indeed, deficits induced by these sorts of investments shouldn't be worrisome. What is worrisome is the nation's declining investments in these fundamentals. Available data aren't exact, but a quarter century ago the federal government's expenditures on schools and job training equaled about 1 percent of domestic product; now, they're under half of a percent. Spending on roads, highways, bridges, airports, and water purification systems was 0.8 of domestic product then; today, it's under 0.3 percent. And investment in basic research went from over 0.5 percent of GDP to about 0.2 percent today.
The question of how we induce enough private and public investment to build the productive capacity we need in the years ahead is worth a vigorous debate. But dogmatic responses to budget deficits are not conducive to this sort of examination. Republicans who insist that deficits don't matter are as subversive of careful thought as are Democrats who think they're always bad.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Robert B. Reich is co-founder of The American Prospect., http://www.prospect.org/web/p...
No More Debate On Debates, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Oil Price Increases Add to Economic Risks, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Bush's Tax Dodge: Cut and Run, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ...---... Enough Already ...---... |
| 09.26.04 (9:24 am) [edit] |
[b]Complaints about the media covering the “horse race” and not the substance of a political campaign are nothing new.[/b] But even a veteran strategist like Lux says the current obsession with scandals and campaign-staff shakeups is testing his patience. Outside of the impact on individual candidates, of course, when the media get distracted by the game of the campaign, the real losers are the American people—because they are deprived of a serious examination of the issues at stake in an election.
[i]Mike Lux is a political strategist[/i].
[b]I do my best not to get [/b]frustrated with the way the media covers the presidential campaign, because otherwise I'd be upset most of the time. Every once in a while, I am pushed to the edge and have to rail about it. Here are my top current examples:
[b]The forged document controversy:[/b] Karl Rove knew that a storm was about to break about George Bush and the National Guard. He knew about the Ben Barnes story. He knew about the Texans for Truth ad that was about to air. He knew that stories were coming out about Bush signing a pledge to report to the National Guard out in Boston, a pledge Bush didn't keep.
One of the reasons that the Rove scenario makes sense is that this is exactly what Karl Rove does when his candidate is in trouble. In a Texas gubernatorial campaign, he had a bug planted in his own campaign office and then "discovered" it right before a big debate. In the 2000 presidential campaign, an aide loyal to Rove suddenly sent a tape of Bush preparing for the first debate to a member of the Gore debate team. Both times there was a big flap about whether the other side was involved in dirty tricks.
I think that Rove had this forgery leaked to CBS, because he knew exactly what would happen: The media, instead of focusing on the absolutely undisputed things that were documented about Bush and the National Guard, are now distracted by the "is the document real or fake" story. Rather than focusing on the legitimate questions about George Bush, people are focused on whether the print was done by a typewriter or word processor, and whether Dan Rather was duped.
The only reporter I've seen mention the Rove scenario so far has called it Democratic paranoia. But sometimes, even though you're paranoid, they're still out to get you. I can't prove that Rove did this, but it sure does fit his M.O. And whether he did it or not, the media is being played by the Republicans, who are getting them to spend an absurd amount of time over one disputed document when there are tons of other undisputed facts that prove Bush slid by without fulfilling his responsibilities in the Texan Air National Guard.
[b]The campaign shakeup: [/b]How many different times are we going to see Kerry campaign shakeup stories? To us inside political junkies, who actually know some of the players, this story was interesting the first time we saw it, with maybe the first followup story carrying a little bit of interest as well. But this has been going on for three weeks now. Enough already.
Memo to my reporter friends: Nobody cares anymore except you and the mothers of the staffers whose names you mentioned. Maybe if you actually covered the campaign itself—as opposed to who is up and who is down—people might start reading your stories again.
There is a reason Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, The Onion and other media outlets that make fun of mainstream journalists have found such an avid audience. There's a reason that polls consistently show such a steep decline in the favorability ratings of journalists.
If journalists would focus on real issues instead of insider horse races, and not allow themselves to constantly get played and distracted by operatives who know how to pull the strings, people in this country would have more respect for journalism. This election is about the most important issues our democracy has ever faced: war and peace in an era of the threat of mass terrorism, a looming federal budget crisis of historic proportions, fundamental questions about our civil liberties, the threat of global warming wreaking massive havoc with our environment, major economic challenges in the face of a jobless recovery. Here's my plea to the people who run mainstream journalism in this country: At least from time to time, would you mind actually covering the campaign in light of the stakes in this election?
[b]Sources:[/b]
Mike Lux, TomPaine, http://www.tompaine.com
No More Debate On Debates, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ...---... Oil Price Increases Add to Economic Risks ...---... |
| 09.26.04 (6:49 am) [edit] |
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] is [i]in the pockets [/i]of the Saudi Royal Family http://www.houseofbush.com/ , and has betrayed our nation ... The traitorous Bushies are artifically[i] holding down [/i]the price at the pumps[i] at this time [/i]to avoid a voter backlash on the 2nd November-- [i]But you can bet on it[/i]-- If Bush tragically gets back in office, the price of gas will jump [i]to a minimum [/i] of $5/gallon in order to enrich his greedy oil cronies & the Saudi Royal Family (his[i] real [/i]constituents) ...[/b]
Over the past several months, world oil prices have risen to record levels—over $48 per barrel—due to increasing demand for oil from growing economies, finite production capacity, and especially security problems related to the insurgency in Iraq. In a climate of economic uncertainty, added pressure from oil prices could be a trigger that undermines durable economic growth in the United States.
Already, some sectors are feeling pressure. On Sept. 1, the Big Three auto makers announced plans to scale back production in anticipation of declining demand. Recent bankruptcy filings by large domestic airlines underscore the risk of high oil prices in a shaky economic environment characterized by stagnant incomes, rising healthcare costs, and retirement insecurity.
The added obstacle of record-high long-term oil prices, and in particular, the perceived permanence of price increases, adds to their negative impact and could reverse economic growth trends. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has no spare capacity, even as oil prices are well above the level that OPEC tries to maintain. A year ago, the government bureau that gathers energy statistics, the Energy Information Agency, issued a mid-range projection for oil of about $27 for 2004. Oil currently costs around $47 per barrel. In a forecast issued in September 2004, the mid-range projection for 2005 was $42. The government’s models factor in short-term price fluctuations; the difference in forecasts between 2004 and 2005 is attributable to data showing the price rise to be permanent: instability in oil-producing regions, demand growth in booming Asian economies, and a global climate of high risk.
Federal Reserve Board Governor Edward Gramlich acknowledged the permanence of high oil prices in a speech on Sept. 14. He warned of “temporary rises in inflation and unemployment,” as well as an overall decline in national income due to high oil prices. Given that the Federal Reserve has consistently been optimistic about the future growth outlook for the economy, Gramlich’s statement can be seen as a conservative estimate of the effects of oil price increases on the economy.
Additional uncertainties arise from America’s growing debt and its ability to repay that debt. Normally, economies can only grow to the extent that they invest in future output, and they can only invest to the extent that they have the resources available, resources that are not used for consumption now: savings. Currently, Americans do not save enough to sustain their economic growth, but the gap is closed by importing savings from abroad. Currently, the price of these capital inflows, the interest rate, is low in comparison to the amount of savings that America needs to support itself. But that could change, and the current high price of oil is one factor that may push up the price of debt. That rise could slow down economic growth.
The current account deficit for the second quarter of 2004, which is by definition equivalent (barring accounting errors and changes in official reserves) to the amount of capital imported by the U.S., was $166.18 billion, well in excess of 5 percent of GDP, the threshold beyond which an adjustment is considered likely. Furthermore, the national saving rate for the U.S. is inadequate to finance the economic growth that Americans and the global economy rely on to sustain standards of living.
The dynamic that allows the United States to sustain its vast debt is financing from abroad. Foreign investors, especially Asian governments and banks, do not want to see a decline in Americans’ willingness to spend, even if it requires sequestering resources in American investments, because American spending drives their exports. The current economic situation, especially in light of high oil prices, can lead to increasing uncertainty about the future value of investments in the U.S. and thus undermines the order that currently supports U.S. economic growth. Greater uncertainty and added risks require that American borrowers offer higher interest rates to attract a constant level of savings. The effect would be slower growth and lower standards of living. The effect would be twofold. For one, it would hurt a struggling middle class here as economic growth and labor market gains could slow, and second, a slowdown of economic activities could spill over to other trading partner countries, as America’s middle class would import less. Slower growth would pull even more middle-class households below the poverty line in an economy that has been hardest on the worst-off.
The current economic situation already presents a great deal of risk to American households. In addition to that risk, high oil prices eat into incomes and hold back economic growth. Furthermore, oil prices could trigger an adjustment in the cost that Americans bear to finance their consumption. As a whole, those dynamics threaten American economic growth and the American standard of living.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Marshall Steinbaum is an economic policy intern at the Center for American Progress., http://www.americanprogress.o...
House of Bush, House of Saud, http://www.houseofbush.com/
Bush's Tax Dodge: Cut and Run, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ...---... Bush's Tax Dodge: Cut and Run ...---... |
| 09.25.04 (1:51 pm) [edit] |
"The president appears to believe that every economic problem is spelled T-A-X.
That misguided thinking has precluded him from adopting a sound policy program.
The centerpiece of his economic agenda, the tax cut that he pushed through Congress, was fiscally irresponsible." - On Bush's Economic Fiasco, Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University, is a recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics.
[b]Rejuvenated and buoyant on the stump, George W. Bush has been hammering John Kerry on spending and taxes. [/b]Assailing the "hidden Kerry tax plan," http://www.kron4.com/Global/s... Bush accuses Kerry of proposing $2 trillion dollars in new spending while raising taxes on the rich, which will somehow be foisted onto the middle class. "You can't tax the rich enough to pay for his spending," Bush tells http://www.whitehouse.gov/new... crowds. "The rich hire lawyers and accountants for a reason -- to stick you with the bill."
There's nothing like concealing tax dodgers. But campaign rhetoric can't hide the reality http://www.washingtonpost.com... that Bush's tax cuts actually increase http://www.washingtonpost.com... taxes on the poor and middle class, starve social services, severely strain already overburdened state budgets and contribute to a skyrocketing national deficit. This week Congress agreed to extend http://www.boston.com/news/na... key provisions of Bush's tax cuts, even though they lack the money to pay for them.
Under Bush,
** Eighteen states passed http://www.prometheus6.org/?q... [b]major tax increases [/b]totaling $6.2 billion to pay for unfunded Bush mandates like No Child Left Behind. That's on top of the $6 billion in tax hikes fifteen states were forced to enact two years ago. And despite the increased revenue, budget cuts nonetheless caused half a million children to lose http://www.bushtax.com/ their health insurance.
** Property taxes jumped http://online.wsj.com/article...,,SB108976284035563030,00 .html?mod=politics%5Fprima ry%5Fhs ten percent nationwide between 2001 and 2003. Major cities saw a 23 percent rise in the last four years.
** The debt burden grows http://www.ctj.org/pdf/debt09... by $87 billion every fifty-one days. The average family of four took on $52,000 more http://www.bushtax.com/ in its share of the national debt over six years, starting in 2001.
** Multinational corporations were sixty-eight percent more likely to invest in tax havens http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... between 1999 and 2002, shortchanging the Treasury Department roughly $70 billion a year.
** The 275 largest corporations paid fewer taxes over the last three years even as profits increased. Twenty-eight corporations paid no taxes http://www.washingtonpost.com... from 2001 to 2003, despite raking in $45 billion in profits.
** Congressional Republicans reduced or eliminated http://www.washingtonpost.com... tax credits for four million poor families while providing $13 billion in corporate tax breaks as part of a new "middle-class" tax cut this week.
** Audits of corporations decreased http://trac.syr.edu/tracirs/t... sixty percent from the Clinton years.
The list goes on and on. If elected to a second-term, Bush promises to push for a major tax overhaul that would far eclipse http://online.wsj.com/article...,,SB109520670502818107,00 .html the damage he's done so far. Meanwhile, despite a record $422 billion deficit, Bush proposed more than $3 trillion http://www.washingtonpost.com... in new spending programs at the Republican convention, far outpacing his "tax and spend," Massachusetts rival. Bush was never a good student, and his numbers don't add up.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Ari Berman,[i] The Daily Outrage[/i], The Nation, http://www.thenation.com
Tax Dodging With Dubya, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Kerry Wins Backing from Nobel Economics Laureates, http://www.commondreams.org/h...
White House Economic Policies Are Bankrupt, http://www.commondreams.org/v...
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| ...---... Bush on Iraq: A Flip and Now Just a Flop ...---... |
| 09.25.04 (12:07 pm) [edit] |
[b]Mr. Bush and His 10 Ever-Changing Different Positions on Iraq:
"A flip and a flop and now just a flop."[/b]
[b]Dear Mr. Bush,[/b]
I am so confused. Where exactly do you stand on the issue of Iraq? You, your Dad, Rummy, Condi, Colin, and Wolfie -- you have all changed your minds so many times, I am out of breath just trying to keep up with you!
Which of these 10 positions that you, your family and your cabinet have taken over the years represents your current thinking:
[b]1983-88: WE LOVE SADDAM.[/b]
On December 19, 1983, Donald Rumsfeld was sent by your dad and Mr. Reagan to go and have a friendly meeting with Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq. Rummy looked so happy in the picture. Just twelve days after this visit, Saddam gassed thousands of Iranian troops. Your dad and Rummy seemed pretty happy with the results because 'The Donald R.' went back to have another chummy hang-out with Saddam's right-hand man, Tariq Aziz, just four months later. All of this resulted in the U.S. providing credits and loans to Iraq that enabled Saddam to buy billions of dollars worth of weapons and chemical agents. The Washington Post reported that your dad and Reagan let it be known to their Arab allies that the Reagan/Bush administration wanted Iraq to win its war with Iran and anyone who helped Saddam accomplish this was a friend of ours.
[b]1990: WE HATE SADDAM.[/b]
In 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait, your dad and his defense secretary, Dick Cheney, decided they didn't like Saddam anymore so they attacked Iraq and returned Kuwait to its rightful dictators.
[b]1991: WE WANT SADDAM TO LIVE.[/b]
After the war, your dad and Cheney and Colin Powell told the Shiites to rise up against Saddam and we would support them. So they rose up. But then we changed our minds. When the Shiites rose up against Saddam, the Bush inner circle changed its mind and decided NOT to help the Shiites. Thus, they were massacred by Saddam.
[b] 1998: WE WANT SADDAM TO DIE.[/b]
In 1998, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others, as part of the Project for the New American Century, wrote an open letter to President Clinton insisting he invade and topple Saddam Hussein.
[b]2000: WE DON'T BELIEVE IN WAR AND NATION BUILDING.[/b]
Just three years later, during your debate with Al Gore in the 2000 election, when asked by the moderator Jim Lehrer where you stood when it came to using force for regime change, you turned out to be a downright pacifist:
"I--I would take the use of force very seriously. I would be guarded in my approach. I don't think we can be all things to all people in the world. I think we've got to be very careful when we commit our troops. The vice president [Al Gore] and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation building. I--I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders. I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war and, therefore, prevent war from happening in the first place. And so I take my--I take my--my responsibility seriously." - October 3, 2000
[b]2001 (early): WE DON'T BELIEVE SADDAM IS A THREAT.[/b]
When you took office in 2001, you sent your Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and your National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, in front of the cameras to assure the American people they need not worry about Saddam Hussein. Here is what they said:
Powell: "We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they have directed that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was 10 years ago when we began it. And frankly, they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors." --February 24, 2001
Rice: "But in terms of Saddam Hussein being there, let's remember that his country is divided, in effect. He does not control the northern part of his country. We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt." --July 29, 2001
[b]2001 (late): WE BELIEVE SADDAM IS GOING TO KILL US![/b]
Just a few months later, in the hours and days after the 9/11 tragedy, you had no interest in going after Osama bin Laden. You wanted only to bomb Iraq and kill Saddam and you then told all of America we were under imminent threat because weapons of mass destruction were coming our way. You led the American people to believe that Saddam had something to do with Osama and 9/11. Without the UN's sanction, you broke international law and invaded Iraq.
[b]2003: WE DON'T BELIEVE SADDAM IS GOING TO KILL US.[/b]
After no WMDs were found, you changed your mind about why you said we needed to invade, coming up with a brand new after-the-fact reason -- we started this war so we could have regime change, liberate Iraq and give the Iraqis democracy!
[b]2003: "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!"[/b]
Yes, everyone saw you say it -- in costume, no less!
[b]2004: OOPS. MISSION NOT ACCOMPLISHED![/b]
Now you call the Iraq invasion a "catastrophic success." That's what you called it this month. Over a thousand U.S. soldiers have died, Iraq is in a state of total chaos where no one is safe, and you have no clue how to get us out of there.
Mr. Bush, please tell us -- when will you change your mind again?
I know you hate the words "flip" and "flop," so I won't use them both on you. In fact, I'll use just one: Flop. That is what you are. A huge, colossal flop. The war is a flop, your advisors and the "intelligence" they gave you is a flop, and now we are all a flop to the rest of the world. Flop. Flop. Flop.
And you have the audacity to criticize John Kerry with what you call the "many positions" he has taken on Iraq. By my count, he has taken only one: He believed you. That was his position. You told him and the rest of congress that Saddam had WMDs. So he -- and the vast majority of Americans, even those who didn't vote for you -- believed you. You see, Americans, like John Kerry, want to live in a country where they can believe their president.
That was the one, single position John Kerry took. He didn't support the war, he supported YOU. And YOU let him and this great country down. And that is why tens of millions can't wait to get to the polls on Election Day -- to remove a major, catastrophic flop from our dear, beloved White House -- to stop all the flipping you and your men have done, flipping us and the rest of the world off.
We can't take another minute of it.
[b]Yours,
Michael Moore[/b], http://www.truthout.org/docs_...
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| ...---... No flip-flop Kerry ...---... |
| 09.25.04 (8:56 am) [edit] |
[b]Finally, the San Francisco Chronicle has done what has become unthinkable in today's he said/he said journalism. [/b]It actually took a look http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin... John Kerry's position on Iraq and delivered its independent judgment. The verdict is in the headline: "Flip-flopping charge unsupported by facts. Kerry always pushed global cooperation, war as last resort."
[b]Sources:[/b]
[i]lakshmi[/i], AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
Who is the Biggest Flip-Flopper??? It's NOT Kerry, It's LIAR Bush!!!, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ...---... Kerry Roars Again!!! ...---... |
| 09.25.04 (8:51 am) [edit] |
[b]The Democratic candidate seems to have finally found his footing on Iraq. [/b]This Washington Post article http://www.washingtonpost.com... describes an aggressive Kerry, attacking every aspect of the Bush Iraq policy:
"Kerry -- his voice hoarse from a cold -- gave remarks that were among his strongest yet, accusing the president of 'stubbornly' sticking to his ill-fated postwar plan for the country, and painting a picture of an administration in "disarray" over a course of action.
"Speaking shortly after Allawi addressed Congress, Kerry maintained that the interim leader backtracked on an earlier statement that did not paint as rosy a picture. 'I think the prime minister is, obviously, contradicting his own statement when he said terrorists are pouring into the country,' Kerry said. ...
"Kerry also took issue with Allawi's statement to Congress that elections could take place in Iraq by January. 'The United States and the Iraqis have retreated from whole areas of Iraq,' Kerry said. 'There are no-go zones in Iraq today. You can't hold an election in a no-go zone.'
"The Democrat ridiculed Bush for saying that the CIA was 'just guessing' on its Iraq intelligence. " 'Just guessing,' America? The CIA? They're not just guessing. They are giving the president of the United States their best judgment,' Kerry said. 'It's called an analysis and the president ought to read it, and he ought to study it and he ought to respond to it.'
"Kerry repeated his charge that Bush has not reached out to allies to help carry the burden in Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Kerry said, 'misled' the American people and Congress about the numbers of troops that have been trained for Iraq.
"'These are not small miscalculations. These are miscalculations that are costing lives, costing America's reputation in the world.'"
[b]Source:[/b]
[i]lakshmi[/i], AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
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| ...---... The Resistance ...---... |
| 09.24.04 (9:45 am) [edit] |
[b]The Federation of American Scientists has posted a very interesting article from [i]Al Zawra[/i], an Iraqi weekly published by the Iraqi Journalists Association, that provides an unprecedented (for me, at least) look at the size and shape of the resistance groups in Iraq. It’s an amazing account, if it’s accurate.[/b]
First it cites the Iraqi National Islamic Resistance, founded in July 2003, the National Front for the Liberation of Iraq, founded in April 2003 (a coalition of 10 groups), the Iraqi Resistance Islamic Front, a Sunni organization, and then a bunch of smaller ones, with details on each.
Then it lists the Baathist groups, including Al Awdah (The Return) and others, which are not Islamist, and describes Shiite groups, including Muqtada Al Sadr’s organization.
And finally, it describes about a dozen kidnapping and terrorist organizations, including Zarqawi’s beheaders.
Here’s an excerpt from it. You can read the whole thing here http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2... :
... "After the fall of Baghdad into the hands of the Anglo-American occupation on 9 April 2003, as a natural reaction, several sectors of Iraqi society confronted the occupation. Resistance cells were formed, the majority of which were of Islamic Sunni and pan-Arab tendencies. These cells started in the shape of scattered groups, without a unifying bond to bind them together.
These groups and small cells started to grow gradually, until they matured to some extent and acquired a clear personality that had its own political and military weight. Then they stated to pursue combining themselves into larger groups.
The majority of these groups do not know their leadership, the sources of their financing, or who provides them with weapons. However, the huge amounts of weapons, which the Saddam Husayn regime left behind, are undoubtedly one of the main sources for arming these groups. These weapons include mortars, RPGs, hand grenades, Kalashnikovs, and light weapons.
Their intellectual tendencies are usually described as a mixture of Islamic and pan-Arab ideas that agree on the need to put an end to the US presence in Iraq.
These groups have common denominators, the most important of which perhaps are focusing on killing US soldiers, rejecting the abductions and the killing of hostages, rejecting the attacks on Iraqi policemen, and respecting the beliefs of other religions. There is no compulsion to convert to Islam, this stems from their Islamic creed, their reading of the jurisprudence texts and historical events, and their respect for the directives and appeals of the Islamic organizations and religious dignitaries." ...
What’s important about the resistance, as Jimmy Carter recently pointed out http://www.military.com/NewsC...,13319,FL_carter_092204,0 0.html?ESRC=eb.nl , is that the opposition to the United States is growing because we are there:
[i]Carter said bloodshed in the country "would be tremendously reduced" if Iraqis knew U.S. troops were not there to stay.
The former president, answering written questions at a Carter Center forum, said the perception among Iraqis of a long-term U.S. military presence is the main reason the violence continues[/i].
If we get out, it will peter out. That doesn’t mean Iraq will avoid a civil war, but if we pull out in the right way, we might be able to arrange things so that the central government holds. But that will mean that we encourage a real Iraqi government, one in which Iraqi nationalists, Baathists, communists, Islamists and other “unfriendlies” are amply represented. And then we’ll have to live with that. Or, we could stay and get chewed up for the next 10 years.
[b]Source:[/b]
Robert Dreyfuss, [i]The Dreyfuss Report[/i], TomPaine, http://www.tompaine.com
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| ...---... HELL ...---... |
| 09.23.04 (4:17 pm) [edit] |
"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of great moral crises maintain their neutrality." - Dante Aleghieri
[b]Salon correspondent Phillip Robertson has spent five months covering the war in Iraq. As the presidential campaign finally focuses on the war, Robertson offers this assessment of the grim situation there.[/b]
[b]Baghdad, Iraq -[/b] Three years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, attacks in which they played no part, the people of Iraq have been liberated from one tyranny only to be remanded to another: continuous urban warfare, religious extremism and a contagion of fear. The celebrated hand of the free market in Iraq has brought not only cell phones and satellite TV, it has also brought down prices for automatic weapons, making them affordable to the average Iraqi. The last time I checked, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher cost about $250.
In his address to the United Nations on Tuesday, President Bush told a subdued General Assembly, "Today, the Iraqi and Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom. The governments that are rising will pose no threat to others. Instead of harboring terrorists, they're fighting terrorist groups. And this progress is good for the long-term security of us all." The words of the president ring hollow.
It is words to this effect that Iraq interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi will likely echo during his visit to the White House Thursday.
Reconstruction, the most important step on the path to a sovereign and stable Iraq, has all but stalled because of targeted acts of violence that reach all the way south to Basra and north to Mosul. Successful countermoves by the Sunni insurgents have prevented the United States and new Iraqi government from gaining any real political support. In fact, billions of dollars originally allocated for reconstruction are now headed for security companies, which are quickly becoming private militias. Unfortunately for optimistic planners in the Bush administration, the coalition is up against not one single group but a constellation of allied militias. It's as if the United States had gone to war against the tribal system itself. There are so many new fighter cells that they are at a loss to distinguish themselves, and so use kidnapping and videotapes as branding strategies. In this market, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Tawhid wa al Jihad, with its monstrous beheading trademark, is the undisputed brand king. Some of the groups are crazier than others. It is a free market of demons.
In the past year, al-Qaida operatives have found in Iraq a fertile recruiting ground, the best possible training camp for jihad against the West, a destination any angry young man can reach if he has the will and pocket money. Iraq's borders, which stretch across hundreds of miles of empty desert, are perfect for smugglers and men seeking martyrdom. No one really knows how many people are coming into Iraq to fight the U.S. But the fighters who do make it across are changing the character of the resistance, internationalizing it, injecting religious extremism into the politics of a once-secular Iraq. Young men coming in from other countries don't fight for Iraq, they fight for Islam.
One of the unutterable truths for the administration is that the U.S. occupation is breeding and fueling insurgent groups. Iraqi government officials rightly fear for their lives, but Iraqi forces, which are supposed to be fighting alongside U.S. troops in the cause of a free and democratic Iraq, are often undisciplined, dangerous and in some places infiltrated by insurgent groups. The Mahdi Army in Sadr City has a number of police officers in its ranks, and in a little remarked upon event that took place during one of the large demonstrations in Baghdad at the time of the siege, the Iraqi police helped Sadr officials address a crowd of Muqtada al-Sadr supporters outside the neutral Green Zone.
On Aug. 13, with U.S. troops looking on, a Mahdi Army sheik urged the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr to go to Najaf to support the men occupying the shrine. He used a public address system in the back of a police pickup to get his message across. The fighters were yelling and grabbing at journalists, proud that the police were on their side, and they wanted us to take note. Above us, in their watchtowers, Iraqi police hung pictures of Muqtada al-Sadr and waved to the crowd. The organizers of the rally were overjoyed.
Fringe groups, extreme groups, associations with the most vocal opposition to the U.S. occupation, steadily acquire more legitimacy in Iraq because they tend to express the true feelings of many Iraqis. Not everyone takes part in the fighting, but many people understand why the groups choose to fight. Jobs in the Iraqi National Guard and the Iraqi police tend to attract poor men who desperately need the money, while the insurgents attract believers, men who feel wronged and humiliated by the U.S. occupation, and who will work for nothing. They are volunteers. Which emotion is stronger?
Iraq is a place where there is no civil debate and interest groups mediate their conflicts with weapons. The U.S. has the most powerful armed presence, its own military, but as an interest group, it represents the smallest number of Iraqis, possibly only those it directly supports. Political legitimacy, we have long known, comes directly from the people; it is not something that can be dictated by a foreign power, no matter how noble its stated intentions. The Allawi government, the result of American occupation, is what many Iraqis scornfully call a U.S. puppet government. In the months following the "transfer of sovereignty," I never heard a single Iraqi offer up praise for it. Not one.
The Sunni insurgents, a creepy hodgepodge of extremist imams, tribal sheiks, former Iraqi government officials and al-Qaida types, have not only scuttled the plans to rebuild the country, they have also cornered the political debate. Relying on abundant examples of victimization and prejudice against Iraqis and Muslims, the fighters present themselves as defenders of the faith. Kidnapping, execution and death threats have become acceptable practices in the eyes of some ordinary Iraqis who may have been horrified by it only a few months before.
When a well-educated Sunni shop owner named Abu Mustapha heard about the kidnapping of French journalists Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot, he wanted to express his sympathy. It sounded like this: "Phillip, it is very bad that they were kidnapped. You should be careful." I pointed out that the people who were abducting noncombatants and threatening to kill them were behaving like animals. The hostage-takers were demanding that the French government repeal a law prohibiting religious symbols from being worn in schools. Abu Mustapha agreed with the insurgents. "You know, the French should change their law," he said. "It is a bad law. Muslim girls should be able to wear the hejab in school."
Contrary to the administration's hopeful statements, we are not seeing the establishment of a stable Iraq, the mopping up of unreformed Baath Party apparatchiks and dead-enders. We are seeing the beginning of a larger conflict that is busily giving birth to monsters.
Since April, the coalition has lost ground in central and western Iraq and will be forced in the coming months to gain it back at great cost. Fallujah and Ramadi, two sizable Iraqi cities, are no longer under Iraqi government control. Sadr City, with several million people, remains a stronghold for the Mahdi Army and the site of a continuing series of battles. Najaf and Karbala, cities the military has taken back from the Mahdi Army, were never strongholds of the Shia resistance. In Najaf, citizens paid a high price for emancipation. They experienced the destruction of their city and must now set about rebuilding it, a process that will take years. It is hard to imagine that the U.S. is loved in Najaf. While the siege may have been a military victory, it was a political defeat. I left Najaf just as men were beginning to dig out bodies.
But Najaf did not serve as the headstone for the Mahdi Army; at best, the military defeat set them back a few months, driving them deeper underground. The first cavalry division and the Marines successfully routed the Muqtada fighters, pushing them to other cities, scattering them but not destroying them. In my second to last day in Najaf, at the end of the siege, journalists in the old city watched militiamen load wooden carts full of weapons and take them to new hiding places. When we asked where they were going, one fighter said to a comrade in an alley just off Rasul Street, "Don't talk to these people, some of them are spies." That was a perfectly normal response and we didn't take it personally. But it was clear that they weren't taking their anti-aircraft weapons and rockets to U.S. collection points for cash payouts. The skittish Mahdi Army fighters were busy smuggling their weapons out of town to other cities and a number of them were almost certainly headed for Baghdad. We watched them trundle the carts over the streets, trying to keep the weapons from spilling out onto the cobblestones.
Here is something everyone in Iraq knows: The U.S. is now fighting a holding action against a growing uprising, and the more it fights the worse it gets. At the other end of the spectrum, if the U.S. military were to suddenly withdraw, the largest armed factions in Iraq would immediately begin to compete for the capital in a bloody civil war. Recently, a National Intelligence Estimate, a document prepared for President Bush by senior intelligence officials, warned of exactly that outcome. It is the kind of analysis that Secretary of State Colin Powell might write off as defeatist if it had come from the press.
How much control does the U.S. military have over the country? Not as much as it would like. Large sections of the capital are in the hands of insurgents, and organized attacks on convoys, U.S. interests and Iraqi targets are on the rise. The administration can say things are getting better, that a newly democratic Iraq is facing its enemies, but last week Baghdadis woke up at 5 in the morning to the sound of a large volley of rockets slamming into the Green Zone. The explosions sounded like they were coming from more than one direction, the sign of a carefully coordinated attack.
This summer, it wasn't unusual to wake up to the sound of roadside bombs going off near Humvees on their early morning U.S. patrols. Month by month, attacks became more severe, bombs more powerful. In the sky above the Duleimi hotel, medevac helicopters would shudder through the air on their way to combat support hospitals. When something truly ugly was going on, we could hear the rush of the medevac Black Hawks in a steady progression.
What the war's champions prefer to ignore is that in large parts of Iraq, broad support exists for anyone willing to pick up a gun and fight the United States. Fighters become local stars and when they die, their friends hold their photographs as treasured objects, pass them around at parties, and later try to emulate their fallen buddies. Paradise awaits, full of virgins who have bodies made of light. Many young Iraqi men believe this. A young fighter guarding the bottom of Rasul Street in Najaf said, just before the collapse of the truce on Aug. 4, "Paradise is a place without corruption. It's not like this place, it smells sweet." Thousands of Iraqis, not all of them poor and unemployed, have checked into the resistance, not only because it's honorable but because it's fun. Spreading through family and neighborhoods, the insurgency can be anywhere, anytime.
A young Apache helicopter gunner who has fought in many of Iraq's major battles wrote me a few days ago and said: "I have a feeling that with every one member of the resistance that we kill, we give birth to ten more." At a distance of hundreds of feet in the air, a perceptive man can say this. Here is what the situation looks like from the ground.
Iraq seems modern only at first glance. The highways, factories and cities are familiar enough but they hide a deep tribal sensibility. Insults to family honor in Iraq are usually repaid in blood or money depending on the severity, and this system of revenge and honor fuels the war instead of slowing it down. The United States military, unable to relate to a tribal society, finds itself the player in a nationwide blood feud. To understand the intensity of these feelings of honor and kinship, read "Othello" or watch "The Godfather." This is how many tribal Iraqis perceive the world. It is not necessarily a lack of sophistication but a mark of being outside the West. Tribal culture in Iraq goes back thousands of years. When an Iraqi man loses a family member to an American missile, he must take another American life to even the score. He may not subscribe to the notion that some Americans are noncombatants, viewing them instead as the members of a supertribe that has come to invade his land.
The war, illegal and founded on a vast lie, has produced two tragedies of equal magnitude: an embryonic civil war in the world's oldest country, and a triumph for those in the Bush administration who, without a trace of shame, act as if the truth does not matter. Lying until the lie became true, the administration pursued a course of action that guaranteed large sections of Iraq would become havens for jihadis and radical Islamists. That is the logic promoted by people who take for themselves divine infallibility - a righteousness that blinds and destroys. Like credulous Weimar Germans who were so delighted by rigged wrestling matches, millions of Americans have accepted Bush's assertions that the war in Iraq has made the United States and the rest of the world a safer place to live. Of course, this is false.
But it is a useful fiction because it is a happy one. All we need to know, according to the administration, is that America is a good country, full of good people and therefore cannot make bloody mistakes when it comes to its own security. The bitter consequence of succumbing to such happy talk is that the government of the most powerful nation in the world now operates unchecked and unmoored from reality; leaving us teetering on the brink of another presidential term where abuse of authority has been recast as virtue.
The logic the administration uses to promote its actions - preemptive war, indefinite detention, torture of prisoners, the abandonment of the Geneva Convention abroad and the Bill of Rights at home - is simple, faith-based and therefore empty of reason. The worsening war is the creation of the Bush administration, which is simultaneously holding Americans and Iraqis hostage to a bloody conflict that cannot be won, only stalemated.
Over the last three years, practicing a philosophy of deliberate deception, fear-mongering and abuse of authority, the Bush administration has done more to undermine the republic of Lincoln and Jefferson than the cells of al-Qaida. It has willfully ignored our fundamental laws and squandered the nation's wealth in bloody, open-ended pursuits. Corporations like Halliburton, with close ties to government officials, are profiting greatly from the war while thousands of American soldiers undertake the dangerous work of patrolling the streets of Iraqi cities. We have arrived at a moment of national crisis.
At home, the United States, under the Bush administration, is rapidly drifting toward a security state whose principal currency is fear. Abroad, it has used fear to justify the invasion of Iraq - fear of weapons of mass destruction, of terrorist attacks, of Iraq itself. The administration, under false premises, invaded a country that it barely understood. We entered a country in shambles, a population divided against itself. The U.S. invasion was a catalyst of violence and religious hatred, and the continuing presence of American troops has only made matters worse. Iraq today bears no resemblance to the president's vision of a fledgling democracy. On its way to national elections in January, Iraq has already slipped into chaos.
[b]Sources:[/b]
By Phillip Robertson, Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/news/fea...
Closer to Civil War, http://www.tompaine.com/artic...
The Long Hard Slog to Elections, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ...---... Chafeeing at the Bit ...---... |
| 09.23.04 (1:54 pm) [edit] |
"Moral cowardice that keeps us from speaking our minds is as dangerous to this country as irresponsible talk. The right way is not always the popular and easy way. Standing for right when it is unpopular is a true test of moral character." - Margaret Chase Smith
[b]Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.) has every reason to be disgusted and disaffected with the leadership of his party. [/b]One of four so-called Rockerfeller Republican senators, who are known to stand for real conservative principles like balanced budgets, and environmental protection, Chafee saw his party adopt a platform at the convention in New York alien to his politics. And Chafee has recently gone on the record http://www.zwire.com/site/new... to say that he will not be voting for George Bush this November because he does not "support the policies of the president."
Chafee has not yet joined Bush on the campaign trail, and he recently rejected an invitation to join the Republican Rhode Island Governor, Don Carcieri as ceremonial co-chairman of the Bush campaign in his home state. Since Rhode Island is currently polling at a healthy 70% for John Kerry, Chafee's rebelliousness may not matter much in the current of the national election. The potential of the other Rockerfeller senators, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe -- both of Maine -- and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, to defect from their party could have greater impact, as their states are in greater contention.
[b]Source:[/b]
[i]Jan[/i], AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
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| ...---... The Horror of Neoconservatism ...---... |
| 09.23.04 (6:44 am) [edit] |
"Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." - Hermann Goering
[b]“F--- Saddam. We’re taking him out”[/b]
[i]The Daily Telegraph [/i]reported on September 18 that the above statement, allegedly a direct quotation, was President Bush’s response to suggestions made in early 2002 that any Iraq War would be sowing the wind. [Surely[i] we can do better [/i]than the current neoconservative fascist disgrace for a president who [i]can't do better [/i]than making reckless, swaggering and dangerously stupid remarks like[i] that[/i]!]
Writers like Pat Buchanan and Paul Craig Roberts are right to label the adherents of the neoconservative movement as ‘Jacobins’, fanatics for power, spiritual descendants of the upper classes who directed the reign of terror following the French Revolution, willing to damn with a spot of ink, willing to trash the bona fides of those who speak against them. As a recanted and repenting neoconservative, I suppose that makes me a Jacobin too.
After these fanatical Jacobins gained power in 2000, to what use did they put it? They inherited a country at its peak, its people keen to return to normality after the previous two months. Listening to George W. Bush’s inauguration, I was struck by his appeal for a civil society, but its reality has been war, bloodshed and the promotion of vested interests and hidden agendas. The boyhood stories I read about the ancient Greeks called the times before The Age of Heroes the Three Ages of Man – The Golden Age, when all was peace; The Silver Age, when all was brutish; and The Bronze Age, when men were intelligent and civilised, but used their skill and learning for nothing but the waging of war, and in the end they killed each other off. The neoconservatives are the true Bronze Men, much more so than any Soviet general. At least you could deter and contain a Soviet general. There is no way to deter a neoconservative, let alone contain them.
They’re not particularly keen on democracy. After Madrid and Jose Maria Aznar’s loss of the election for his lie that the bombing was ETA’s work, they had no hesitation in labelling a people reeling from the shock of a massive terrorist attack as ‘cowards’ and ‘appeasers’. The Spanish appeased nobody. Instead, they refused en masse to be lied to about the identity of those responsible for an attack that killed hundreds of their countrymen.
They don’t bother themselves with whether or not you can support your family by having a job. Like all Jacobins, they are money and power people, many of them, like George W. Bush, the fruit from the top of the social tree. President Bush refers to gatherings of corporate CEO’s as ‘his base’, when there has been no truer word spoken in jest. All the neoconservatives are avid outsourcers, zealots who see the free market as the only way to build prosperity, forgetting that the only thing a free market can do is find its lowest cost. Once an industry has gone to a place where it can be performed at a lower cost than in America it is gone for good and it is never coming back. To these people, your status as an American citizen means nothing. You have certain rules to play by – produce, pay tax, spend money and sell your future to the market. They’ll leave you alone provided you play along with the rules, being good boys and girls, buying duct tape and maxing out your cards to help keep China afloat because one of your Presidents decided he would help the gang of criminals and tyrants who run that country get rich. Hardly Jefferson’s dream.
The Jacobins of the French Revolution ultimately lost because their fanaticism caused them to turn on each other. History isn’t looking good for the neocons, for the same fate awaits them. It is a sin crying out to Heaven for vengeance that they should have shed so much blood in the pursuit of their ambitions. Thank God, their fate is still in your hands come November – if it takes the mass sacking of all known neoconservatives from the Pentagon for the President to proclaim this bloody philosophy dead, and to reclaim the soul and credibility of the Grand Old Party that should be a keeper of all historic, honest and wholesome American values, then he’d better start handing out the dismissal notices.
[b]Source:[/b]
Commentary by Martin Kelly, The Washington Dispatch, http://www.washingtondispatch...
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| ...---... Barcelona (and Noah's Ark) Against Bush ...---... |
| 09.22.04 (2:55 pm) [edit] |
"Each nation feels superior to other nations. That breeds patriotism - and wars." - Dale Carnegie
Europeans are avidly following the U.S. presidential campaign, and many are terrified enough at the prospect of a Bush reelection that they are finding creative ways to contribute to the anti-Bush oeuvre. No Bush From Barcelona http://www.nobushfrombarcelon... is the brainchild of Catalan journalist and cartoonist Siscu Baiges. Pleads Baiges, who adds a charming new drawing to his site every day: "If the world voted for the US presidential election, Bush will get less votes than Saddam Hussein if he were a candidate. Please, change your President. We, from Barcelona, cannot vote but we will suffer the results of the election. There are times in which a man has to say NO. A woman as well. Even the entire animal family in Noah's ark would say NO. No Bush From Barcelona wants another world, more peaceful, safer for the American people and for everyone else."
Baiges is no newcomer to political satire; his previous websites lampooned right-wing candidates in elections in Barcelona and Spain.
[b]Memo to Karl Rove:[/b] all the politicians targeted by Baiges have proved, so far, to be electoral losers.
[b]Source:[/b]
[i]Tai[/i], AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
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| ...---... America A Hated Nation, Thanks To Bush ...---... |
| 09.22.04 (10:52 am) [edit] |
"Arrogance diminishes wisdom." - Arabian proverb
"When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken, giving views to passion without that proper deliberation which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities." - David Hume
"The truest characters of ignorance are vanity, and pride and arrogance." - Samuel Butler
[b]Bush is an arrogant buffoon-- The trouble[i] is [/i]that he is dragging the United States of America down with him ...[/b]
The world view of the US superpower has seldom been as low as since President George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq without explicit UN approval.
Arrogant, aggressive, too unilateralist are just some of the terms used to describe the US administration.
Opinion polls taken around the world confirmed the dim view of the US leader and his policies, which is most notable among traditional allies in Europe and the Arab world.
Anti-Americanism has affected previous administrations during the Vietnam war and the deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe in the 1980s, according to Melvyn Leffler, a professor of American history at the University of Virginia, in an article for Foreign Policy magazine.
"But the breadth and depth of the current anti-Americanism are unprecedented," he said.
According to a study published this month by the German Marshall Fund and Compania di San Paolo of Italy, 76 percent of Europeans oppose Bush's foreign policy. This is a spectacular 20 percentage point rise in two years.
The fall in US popularity in the Muslim world has been marked by an accompanying increase in the popularity of Osama bin Laden, who tops the US most wanted list after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Sixty-five percent of Pakistanis, 45 percent of Moroccans and 31 percent of Turks have a favourable view of the on-the-run Al-Qaeda leader, according to a Pew research poll released in March.
If the rest of the world was voting in the November 2 presidential election, the Democrats' John Kerry would walk the competition against Bush.
The Massachusetts senator easily beat Bush in 32 out of 35 countries asked by the Globescan institute for a survey released this month.
Kerry wins in countries that opposed the Iraq war -- 64 percent to five percent in France, 74-10 in Germany, 61-16 in Canada -- and those in Bush's "coalition of the willing" -- 47 percent to 16 percent in Britain and 43-23 in Japan.
Bush wins in Poland, the Philippines and Nigeria.
The president's personal style is the main cause of his popularity problems abroad, according to Thomas Carothers, a foreign policy specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
"The very things that make him a popular and effective politician here at home are very irritating to many other people in the world," said Carothers.
"His kind of sarcastic behaviour, his kind of popular touch which is very nationalistic, sell very poorly in the rest of the world.
"It seems very foreign to most other people. There is a sort international quality of statesmen that he is the complete oppostite of."
The importance of the causes that Bush espouses are also universally recognised. The German Marshall Fund study found that 95 percent of Europeans and 96 percent of Americans believe that international terrorism is an important threat.
It is the answer to that threat which is in dispute.
Only 41 percent of Europeans believe that a war is justified, against 82 percent of Americans, most of whom also believe that the UN approval is not necessary.
But again, experts such as Judy Colp Rubin at the Foreign Policy Research Institute say this is not a new phenomenon.
"The kind of attacks encountered today would have been all too familiar in tone to Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, who had to spend as much time and energy as current leaders proving to Europeans that their country was not inherently bad," she wrote in an essay on anti-Americanism.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Bush Policy Brings the World on his Back, Agence France Press, http://www.truthout.org/docs_...
UN-Convincing Yet Again, http://www.tblog.com/template...
George Bush, Master of Sanctimony, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ...---... George Bush, Master of Sanctimony ...---... |
| 09.22.04 (8:49 am) [edit] |
Sanctimony -- n. -- the quality of being hypocritically devout
[b]Bush is certainly a sanctimonious [i]son-of-a-bitch [/i]who is derided around the world as a laughing stock, except that the world is also alarmed because of his insane neo-con agenda leading to lawless massacres and slaughters of innocents abroad [i]and[/i] callous recklessness and disregard for working families here at home ...[/b]
Two years ago, when George Bush addressed the United Nations on Iraq, he blustered that the U.N. risked becoming irrelevant if it didn't do what he wanted it to do, which was to go along for the Iraq ride.
Bush told Bob Woodward in Plan of Attack that "it was a speech I really enjoyed giving."
While Bush was not quite so haughty this time around, he still seemed to be enjoying himself as he laid the sanctimony on thick.
He warned the delegates "not to grow weary in our duties, or waver in meeting them."
He boasted that "we have the historic chance . . . to fight radicalism and terror with justice and dignity," willfully ignoring the Abu Ghraib scandal that has so besmirched the U.S. reputation abroad.
On Iraq and Afghanistan today, he said, "Freedom is finding a way," and that both peoples "are on the path to democracy and freedom."
It must be a slippery path, though, and a difficult way.
Bush hinted at this by saying, "The work ahead is demanding." But he used this acknowledgment to upbraid the delegates: "The proper response to difficulty is not to retreat, it is to prevail."
Amazingly, he said, "The people of Iraq have regained sovereignty," even though they are being ruled by a former CIA asset appointed by the Iraqi Governing Council, which Bush's viceroy, Paul Bremer, handpicked.
Bush's entire discussion about Iraq reeked of hubris. Just last week, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called the Iraq War "illegal," but Bush said "a coalition of nations enforced the just demands of the world." Once again, he simply assumed that the United States has the right to be the unilateral enforcer of U.N. Security Council resolutions, even when the Security Council itself does not agree. To give those resolutions meaning and "for the sake of peace" (calling George Orwell), Bush said the war against Saddam Hussein was necessary.
Bush did not mention the elusive weapons of mass destruction, incidentally. Instead, he emphasized that the war against Iraq this time was to "deliver the Iraqi people from an outlaw dictator."
On the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Bush, as is his custom, spent much more time and much stronger language berating Yasser Arafat, though not by name, than in scolding the Israeli government.
This imbalance must have been clear to people in the Arab and Muslim world.
Bush did denounce the crimes in the Darfur region of Sudan, "crimes my government has concluded are genocide." But he was short on any follow through that is necessary to stop that genocide.
The only new initiative he offered during his entire speech was the establishment of something he called a Democracy Fund to help set up "independent courts, a free press, political parties, and trade unions." Trade unions? Since when has Bush been a supporter of them? Bush added, "Money from the fund would also help set up voter precincts and poling places, and support the work of election monitors."
We may need those election monitors here on November 2.
Throughout the speech, the U.N. delegates sat on their hands. At the end, there was only the politest applause.
Resentment against Bush the Bully ran high.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive, http://www.progressive.org/we...
President Bush Fails To Answer Critical Questions, http://www.tblog.com/template...
President Bush Declares Another Premature "Mission Accomplished" At The U.N., http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ...---... The Mad King George Square??? Hmmm... ...---... |
| 09.22.04 (6:57 am) [edit] |
[b]Surprise, surprise ...[/b]
"A year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush."
[b]Richard Perle
AEI Keynote speech, http://www.aei.org/events/con...
September 22, 2003[/b]
[b]Source:[/b]
Joshua Micah Marshall, TalkingPoints, http://www.talkingpointsmemo....
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| ...---... Zogby Gives Kerry 297-241 Lead in Electoral College ...---... |
| 09.21.04 (3:51 pm) [edit] |
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." - Winston Churchill
"The latest Zogby Interactive poll of 16 battleground states shows Mr. Kerry ahead in 11 states, one state fewer than in a poll taken during the Republican convention two weeks earlier... Mr. Kerry's 11 states control 125 votes, while Mr. Bush's five states have 52. Thus, if the results on Election Day match the findings of the Zogby poll, Mr. Kerry would win, 297-241... Excluding Florida and Arkansas, which Mr. Kerry leads by less than one point, the senator's lead is 264-241, with 33 electoral votes up for grabs. Taking away four states where fewer than three points separate the candidates, Mr. Kerry is ahead 254-236, with 48 votes up for grabs. Still, there are signs that Mr. Kerry is gaining back some of the strength that was sapped during the Republican convention. In the latest poll, Mr. Kerry gained ground on the president in nine states, while Mr. Bush improved his standing in six."
[b]Source:[/b]
Zogby Sound Bites, http://zogby.com/Soundbites/R...
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| ...---... What Is Bush Hiding??? ...---... |
| 09.21.04 (2:12 pm) [edit] |
[b]"What goes around comes around" ... Now it's time for Bush to answer[i] unanswered [/i]questions ...[/b]
It is to be welcomed that President Bush wants to clear up questions about his National Guard service. He wants more details out there, and good for him. This story should be laid to rest, and the one person who can do it is named George W. Bush.
Up to now, Bush has been interested in a rather narrow aspect of the story. He wanted Dan Rather and CBS News to come clean about whether they used fake documents in reporting on the president's Guard service back in the 1970s.
"There are a lot of questions and they need to be answered," Bush told the Union Leader in Manchester, N.H., last week. "I think what needs to happen is people need to take a look at the documents, how they were created, and let the truth come out."
I couldn't agree more. And apparently CBS came to the same view. CBS messed up, and yesterday, Rather fessed up. He said the network could no longer stand behind the documents. There will be much hand-wringing about the media in the coming days, and properly so.
But what's good for Dan Rather, who is not running for president, ought to be good for George Bush, who is. "[i]There are a lot of questions and they need to be answered[/i]." Surely that presidential sentiment applies as much to Bush's Guard service as to Rather's journalistic methods.
The New York Times put the relevant questions on the table yesterday in a lengthy review of Bush's life in 1972, "the year George W. Bush dropped off the radar screen," as the Times called it. The issues about Bush's National Guard service, the Times wrote, include "why he failed to take his pilot's physical and whether he fulfilled his commitment to the guard."
Oh, I can hear the groaning: "But why are we still talking about Vietnam?" A fair question that has several compelling answers.
First, except for John McCain, Republicans were conspicuously happy to have a front group spread untruths about John Kerry's Vietnam service in August and watch as the misleading claims were amplified by the supposedly liberal media. The Vietnam era was relevant as long as it could be used to raise character questions about Kerry. But as soon as the questioning turned to Bush's character, we were supposed to call the whole thing off. Why? Because the media were supposed to question Kerry's character but not Bush's.
And, please, none of this nonsense about how Kerry "opened the door" to the assault on his Vietnam years by highlighting his service at the Democratic National Convention. Nothing any candidate does should ever be seen as "opening the door" to lies about his past. Besides, Vietnam veterans with Republican ties were going after Kerry's war record long before the Democratic convention.
But, most important, there is only one reason the story about Bush's choices during the Vietnam years persists. It's because the president won't give detailed answers to the direct questions posed by the Times story and other responsible media organizations, including the Boston Globe. Their questions never depended on the discredited CBS documents.
Bush could end this story now so we could get to the real issues of 2004. It would require only that the president take an hour or so with reporters to make clear what he did and did not do in the Guard. He may have had good reasons for ducking that physical exam. Surely he can explain the gaps in his service and tell us honestly whether any pull was used to get him into the Guard.
But a guy who is supposed to be so frank and direct turns remarkably Clintonian where the National Guard issue is concerned. "I met my requirements and was honorably discharged" is Bush's stock answer, which does old Bill proud. And am I the only person exasperated by a double standard that treated everything Bill Clinton ever did in his life ("I didn't inhale") as fair game but now insists that we shouldn't sully ourselves with any inconvenient questions about Bush's past?
I'm as weary as you are that our politics veer away from what matters -- Iraq, terrorism, health care, jobs -- and get sidetracked into personal issues manufactured by political consultants and ideological zealots. But the Bush campaign has made clear it wants this election to focus on character and leadership. If character is the issue, the president's life, past and present, matters just as much as John Kerry's.
Dan Rather has answered his critics. Now it is Bush's turn.
[b]Source:[/b]
E. J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com...
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| ...---... Voting: Democracy, Schemocracy ...---... |
| 09.21.04 (11:42 am) [edit] |
"What is it we all seek for in an election? To answer its real purposes, you must first posses the means of knowing the fitness of your man; and then you must retain some hold upon him by personal obligation or dependence" - Edmund Burke
Exactly six weeks from the November 2 election, new evidence is emerging about the Bush administration's efforts to suppress voter turnout. The Washington Post reports Attorney General John Ashcroft has opened "several criminal inquiries into alleged voter fraud" in "key presidential battlegrounds, including Ohio and West Virginia." While voter fraud is a concern, civil rights advocates "complain that the department is putting too much emphasis on investigating new voter registrations in poor and minority communities – which tend to favor Democrats – and not enough on ensuring that those voters do not face discrimination at the polls." New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron said, "This is just an attempt to let people know that Big Brother is watching. It may well be aimed at trying to keep people away from the polls."
[b]ASHCROFT POLITICIZES JUSTICE DEPT. IN TIME FOR THE ELECTION:[/b] The New Yorker reports that "under Ashcroft, the Justice Department has changed its method of hiring lawyers, who are supposed to be apolitical." Specifically, he put a key hiring program under the purview of his political appointees, instead of allowing career professionals to continue administering it. Now, "lawyers inside and outside the department say that the change has already had an effect – especially in politically sensitive places like the Voting Section." Ashcroft "disbanded the hiring committee and took over all hiring," one lawyer told the magazine. "That was a huge deal. Under previous Republican Administrations, that hadn't happened."
[b]MORE FLORIDA FOLLIES:[/b] Florida is already a hotbed of voting controversy in 2004. In July, the Miami Herald found the Republican Party is staking out naturalization ceremonies for new immigrants to trick them into registering as Republicans. Specifically, GOP operatives have been handing out voter registration forms to new citizens just moments after being sworn in by the U.S. government with the party affiliation box already checked Republican. A month later, Gov. Jeb Bush (R) had his political appointee at a key county election board hire a law firm with direct connections to the Bush-Cheney campaign. Though the Broward County Elections Board is supposed to be nonpartisan, Bush's official there hired the law firm Blosser & Sayfie. James Blosser is a top fundraiser for the Bush-Cheney campaign, and Justin Sayfie is co-chairman of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Broward County. The firm, which was fired after public outrage, was to represent the county in legal challenges should another election debacle occur.
[b]CLAMPING DOWN ON PROTESTS:[/b] If citizens thought they had the ability to freely protest these and other election controversies, they should think again. The New York Times reports that the FBI "contacted" and detained a number of people who have organized political demonstrations, forcing some to appear before a grand jury to disclose what they know of protest plans. As former National Security Council staffer Mark Brzezinski wrote in a Boston Globe op-ed, protestors "were asked whether they planned any acts of violence, whether they knew of anyone who had, and whether they realized it was a crime to withhold such information. This action smacks of political harassment and intimidation of legitimate antiwar protesters." Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported that the Secret Service, led by the president's top personal aide, accosted peaceful AIDS demonstrators during a Bush speech last month. Demonstrators were "shoved and pulled from the room – some by their hair, one by her bra straps – and then arrested for disorderly conduct and detained." Reporters who tried to cover the scene were told by the White House they would be punished if they covered it. One Secret Service agent said there was a "different set of rules" for reporters who did not seek out the activists.
[b]EXCLUDED EXPATS:[/b] The Associated Press reports Americans abroad "are being denied access to a U.S. Department of Defense Web site designed to make it easier for them to cast absentee ballots." While the overall program ignores legitimate ballot security issues – including unprotected e-mailing and faxing of overseas ballots – the Pentagon is now shutting down access to the program's website to Americans living in selected countries. The Pentagon cites unspecified threats from hackers.
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| ...---... Is Bush Planning a Military Coup??? ...---... |
| 09.21.04 (9:59 am) [edit] |
[b]This week, as Bush's numbers drift down again and the Democrats came back out swinging after an inconscionable media-White House assault on Kerry, it was announced that the Pentagon has set up a new "headquarters" in Washington DC, http://www.sacbee.com/24hour/... purportedly to "to assist civil authorities in responding to a terrorist attack here." [/b]Called The Joint Forces Headquarters for the National Capital Region, the reason for the "fort's" being is vague, to say the least. When asked, Army Maj. Gen. Galen B. Jackman refused to be more specific than:. "There are vulnerabilities in the nation's capital." Yeah, right - with the chief "vulnerability" being that Bush may lose the election and a new administration may come in. What is the Pentagon going to do? Declare the arrival of the incoming Kerry administration in the capitol as "a terrorist invasion?"
[b]White House and Moonie Times Cook Up Rumors of 'Spectacular Attack' around Election Day[/b]
How predictable can ya get? The UK Sun reports http://www.thesun.co.uk/artic...,,2-2004440509,00.html (the White House wants to see how their scam plays in England first, no doubt!) : "Terrorists are said to be plotting a "spectacular" attack on the US to coincide with the presidential elections. Risks of an outrage will peak around the November 2 election and the inauguration ceremony on January 20, according to intelligence reports. Intelligence sources [yeah - Karl Rove and Dick Cheney] talking to the Washington "Moonie" Times believe al-Qaeda chiefs are planning a strike that will be even bigger and deadlier than the September 11 attacks of 2001. Possible targets in the US include the White House, Pentagon and Washington, as well as landmarks and business sites in New York." The only "spectacular attack" on America likely to happen on Nov. 2 is the attempted theft of the White House by G. W. Bush - and should that attempt fail, an engineered "disaster" followed by a military coup.
[b]Anybody want to "Connect-the-Dots"???[/b]
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| ... JobWatch: US States Still in Job Hole [Graphical Analyses of the Status Across US States] ... |
| 09.21.04 (6:41 am) [edit] |
"Seems like the government's got more interest in a dead man than a live one." - Tom Joad, The Grapes of Wrath
“Whenever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Whenever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there ... I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.” - Tom Joad, The Grapes of Wrath
"Rich folk come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good an' they die out. But we keep acoming, Pa, cus' we're the people that live." - Ma Joad, The Grapes of Wrath
[b]"Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow ... And in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." - The Grapes of Wrath [/b]
[b]Nothing is more disspiriting than to witness the despair of those who lose their very livelihoods ... For our nation's spirit, survival and well-being, "We the People" must reject the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] for they have brought war, death and disaster abroad[i] and [/i]rising joblessness, poverty and neglect of those in need here at home ...[/b]
Recent months have brought the overdue news that a majority of states finally have growing payrolls. But as welcome as these reports have been, job growth in most instances is still insufficient.
In the so-called "jobless recovery" of the early 1990s, 33 months after that recession ended, only nine states still had fewer jobs than when the recession started. There was a strong regional pattern—the nine states were California and eight states around the northeastern part of the country.
The current jobless recovery is a much different story. By August 2004, the current recession has also been over for 33 months, but the jobs picture across the country is very different. Thirty-two states, spread across the country, are still in the jobs hole. In some cases, the job deficit is still severe: Colorado, for example, is still down over 70,000 jobs (3% of employment) and Ohio has lost over 224,000 jobs (4% of employment).
Simply looking at the number of jobs, however, understates the severity of the shortfall. For example, while Texas has 93,000 fewer jobs compared to the start of the recession, the working-age population has grown by over 5%. In order to have kept up with a growing population, the state of Texas would need over 600,000 more jobs than it actually has.
And in all but one (Alaska) of the 18 states with more jobs than when the recession began, job growth has been insufficient to keep up with population growth. So while Wisconsin has 2,000 more jobs than when the recession began, it will need to add over 26,000 jobs per month for the rest of 2004 in order to have enough jobs by the end of the year to account for the growth in population over that time. (Wisconsin has only added an average of 7,000 jobs a month in the last six months.)
Unemployment rates, which are higher in 44 states than when the recession began, offer another glimpse into state-level labor market pain.
[b]Job growth lags projections for Bush Administration tax cuts in 48 states [/b]
The Bush Administration's economic policies continue to fail to generate the jobs that the administration claimed would be created. When President Bush argued for his "Jobs and Growth" tax cut plan last year, his Council of Economic Advisers predicted the creation of millions of jobs. Thus far, the national economy has fallen over two million jobs short of what was projected, http://www.jobwatch.org/natio... with only two states ahead of projections.
For most states in August, the difference between the Bush Administration claim and the actual jobs situation is enormous. Florida, for example, will have to add almost 50,000 jobs per month in the rest of 2004 in order to receive its share of the predicted benefits of the tax cut, but it has only added an average of 14,000 over the last six months. Michigan will have to add 55,000 jobs per month, but it has lost a total of 9,000 jobs in the last six months.
[b]Tables (August)[/b]
. Job growth compared to working-age population growth, start of recession through August 2004 - http://www.jobwatch.org/20040...
. Job growth compared to job growth projected by Bush Administration tax plan, June 2003 through August 2004 - http://www.jobwatch.org/20040...
. Unemployment rate by state, 41 months after start of recession - http://www.jobwatch.org/20040...
. Total payroll employment by state - http://www.jobwatch.org/20040...
[b]Organizations[/b]
For information on the jobs situation in particular states, go to the web sites of the organizations in the Economic Analysis and Research Network http://www.epinet.org/content... (EARN).
[b]Sources:[/b]
Mind the Gap in the Middle, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Under the Radar: Corrupt CEOs Un-Ethical???, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Poor Children Left Behind, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Bush's Cut-and-Spend Plan Is Math-Challenged, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Economic Policy Institute, JobWatch, http://www.jobwatch.org/state...
[b]Courtesy of WinstonSmith http://winstonsmith.tblog.com... [/b]
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| ...---... Missile Defenseless ...---... |
| 09.20.04 (5:57 pm) [edit] |
"Man's mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth." - Desiderius Erasmus
[b]Erasmus was right -- Otherwise, what explains the ability of the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]to continue to get away with their heinous lies, deceptions and embezzlement of the American People??? ...[/b]
With the Patriot system still identifying ghosts and shooting down allied aircraft over Iraq http://www.boston.com/news/gl... , it should be no surprise that national missile defense is no closer to shooting down an incoming bogey. That both systems are deployed speaks to the ability of missile defense firms to bamboozle Congress and a more-than-willing DoD.
[u][b]Friendly fire shootdown[/b][/u]
THE TRUEST honoring of our war dead from friendly fire is to remember them by using what we learn from accident investigations to save the lives of other warriors. This sacred duty can only be fulfilled by insisting that investigations of friendly fire tragedies be complete, thorough, and honest. This has yet to occur in the investigations of the two fatal Patriot shootdowns during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
On March 22, 2003, a Patriot air defense battery -- the most fearsome air defense in the world -- shot down a British Tornado fighter as it was descending within a prearranged "safe" corridor to land at its nearby air base in Kuwait. The official unclassified executive summary of the subsequent investigation stated that it was shot down because it "appeared to be an approaching hostile Iraqi missile directly targeting the [Patriot] battery." The US Army investigation report also cited the failure of the Tornado to properly identify itself as a "friendly aircraft" due to problems with its Identification Friend or Foe system.
A careful reading of the heavily redacted 500 pages of appendices released with the Army report reveals a different story. The UK Tornado was not heading for the Patriot battery as claimed in the Executive Summary. Nor was the Tornado detected and misclassified as a hostile missile.
The "threatening" target that was first detected by the Patriot battery was in fact a "ghost" created by errant radio signals. This false target was misinterpreted by the Patriot's artificial intelligence to be an antiradar homing missile -- a missile designed to attack defense radars by homing on their radio signals. When the ghost missile was initially detected, it was 10 miles east of the victim Tornado, and traveling in a direction that brought it close to or into the approach path of the victim.
When the Patriot Unit fired at the ghost missile, the launched Patriot interceptor did not see the false ghost target but instead locked onto the Tornado. The entire engagement, from launch of the Patriot to destruction of the Tornado, took roughly 20 plus seconds. The crew of two was killed instantly and probably never knew what hit them.
It is also clear from the voluminous, disorganized, and redacted appendices that the Patriot's top commanding officers knew that electronic signals from multiple Patriot units operating near each other were causing their artificial intelligence systems to routinely detect and track false aircraft and missile targets. In spite of this knowledge, top Patriot commanding officers allowed many Patriot units to operate without the built-in safeguard of rapid communications with other radars in the air defense.
As a result the attacking Patriot battery could not be told quickly enough by an adjacent Patriot battery, its battalion command center, and other observing Patriot batteries that the ghost missile target was not real, and that the Tornado was in fact a friendly aircraft approaching for landing in a prearranged "safe" corridor.
Even more disturbing is the way the investigation was performed.
The investigation was led by Brigadier General Howard B. Bromberg, one of the top commanding officers who may have been responsible for the decision to allow Patriot units to operate without communications to other units. Bromberg was put in charge of the accident investigation even though he and other senior officers both above and below his command had serious conflicts of interest in the matter.
Bromberg's investigation only interviewed very junior officers involved at the lowest levels of the incident, most of them ranking first lieutenants or lower. When superior officers in the US Air Force reviewed Bromberg's report, they almost certainly knew about the sharp disparity between the facts in the appendices and the sharply disparate claims in the final accident report. The press has reported that the Royal Air Force was not satisfied with the report, yet for reasons as yet unexplained, both the US Air Force and the Royal Air Force did not publicly contest the false and misleading findings.
Within one week of the tragic Patriot shootdown of the Tornado a US Navy F-18 pilot was killed by a Patriot over Karbala, Iraq, and a US Air Force F-16 had to fire in self-defense on another Patriot unit that was about to attack. It is clear that the flawed and automated artificial intelligence in the Patriot units played a critical role in each of these two other incidents.
Is this the way to honor our war dead?
[b]Sources:[/b]
Theodore A. Postol is a professor of science, technology, and national security policy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, http://www.boston.com/news/gl...
Shooting Down Missile Defense, Fred Kaplan, Slate, http://slate.msn.com/id/20867...
Inside the Pentagon, http://www.pbs.org/now/politi...
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| ...---... Go Noam (No Ralph)!!! ...---... |
| 09.20.04 (2:35 pm) [edit] |
"Anyone who says, 'I don't care if Bush gets elected' is basically telling poor and working people in the country, 'I don't care if your lives are destroyed. I don't care whether you are going to have a little money to help your disabled mother. I just don't care, because from my elevated point of view I don't see much difference between them.' That's a way of saying, 'Pay no attention to me, because I don't care about you.' Apart from its being wrong, it's a recipe for disaster if you're hoping to ever develop a popular movement and a political alternative."--Noam Chomsky, 2004
This quote comes from a recent e-mail sent out by Progressive Democrats of America--just one of a slew of groups, including Greens for Kerry, Repentant Nader Voters and United Progressives for Victory--making the case that even if you agree with Ralph Nader and/or the Greens on the issues, the paramount priority is to (re)defeat Bush in November.
Their appeal--and that of former Nader supporters issued last week--is ever more important now that the Florida Supreme Court has bolstered President Bush's prospects in a crucial swing state by ruling that Nader can appear on that state's ballot as the Reform Party presidential candidate.
Circulate Chomsky's quote widely!
[b]Sources:[/b]
Mind the Gap in the Middle, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Under the Radar: Corrupt CEOs Un-Ethical???, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Poor Children Left Behind, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Katrina vanden Heuvel,[i] Editor's Cut[/i], TheNation, http://www.thenation.com
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| ...---... Under the Radar: Corrupt CEOs Un-Ethical??? ...---... |
| 09.20.04 (12:14 pm) [edit] |
"Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil." - Albert Schweitzer
[b]Funny, how with all of this sanctimonious howling by the right-wing neo-con hypocrites over the CBS memo authenticity question (although the[i] content [/i]of the Killian memos is accurate according to his secretary Ms. Knox: A'W'OL Bush is a deserter-[i]cum[/i]-cowar d who partied his way thru Vietnam!)-- [i]nobody[/i] seems to be very interested in the corporate rape of the American working people ... [i]Hmmm[/i] ...[/b]
[b]CORPORATE – CEOS UNETHICAL:[/b] The chief U.S. financial regulator, William Donaldson, attacked U.S. CEOs for failing to provide 'ethical' leadership http://news.ft.com/cms/s/3a90... for their companies and granting themselves exorbitant compensation http://money.cnn.com/2004/09/... . Donaldson, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said that while corporate governance had improved following the wave of financial scandals, "senior executives had to set an example that went beyond the letter of the law." He said the lack of progress in linking boardroom pay more closely to performance was one sign that many CEOs were failing to give appropriate leadership. Over the summer, a study showed CEOs at the nation's largest companies saw their raises more than doubled in 2003 http://money.cnn.com/2004/07/... , even as employee compensation continued to stagnate http://www.americanprogress.o... . A UFE study found that the biggest CEO paychecks go to the companies that outsource the most U.S. jobs http://www.faireconomy.org/pr... . The Bush administration, despite Donaldson's comments, continues pursuing CEO-friendly plans to rob workers of overtime pay http://www.workingamerica.org... and place added burdens on unions http://www.aflcio.org/issuesp... .
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| ...---... John McCain: The October Surprise? ...---... |
| 09.20.04 (11:33 am) [edit] |
"To betray you must first belong." - Harold Philby, British Spy
[b]Will John McCain be the October Surprise?[/b]
Months ago, when the Republican senator who is often dubbed a maverick finally started campaigning with George W. Bush--after news reports noted that John Kerry had delicately discussed with McCain the idea of McCain becoming Kerry's running mate--the question asked by political commentators (and cable talk show consumers) was, what does McCain want? Did he want to make peace with the GOP establishment so he could run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 (when he would be 72 years old)? Was he looking to be secretary of defense? Was he hoping that Bush would bounce Dick Cheney and put McCain on the ticket?
The obvious answer was that McCain was just yielding to the overwhelming Ds-and-Rs dynamic of Washington's binary culture. In his case, the issue was whether McCain was a Republican or not. And if he did want to continue being a GOPer in good standing, then he had to do right by the Family. (Think The Sopranos.) That meant putting aside the resentment and anger he must have felt toward the Bush clan, which--take your pick--ran or countenanced an ugly and vicious campaign against McCain in the South Carolina primary in 2000 that included questioning McCain's commitment to veterans and spreading rumors that McCain had been brainwashed in a Vietnamese prison camp, that his adopted daughter was a love-child he had had with a prostitute, and that his wife was a junkie. So this year McCain sucked it up and hit the trail for Bush, even as the Bush brigade was mounting the same sort of trash-and-slash attack against McCain's colleague, John Kerry. At least, McCain could point to the war in Iraq as a point of agreement with Bush. Though McCain, according to a McCain adviser, has not accepted the neoconservatives' argument (adopted by Bush) that the Iraq war is necessary as an initial step in remaking the region, he believed that because Saddam Hussein posed a possible threat and was such a tyrant he needed "to be taken out."
But maybe there was another reason beyond loyalty to the party and to the commander-in-chief why McCain saddled up with Bush. Perhaps he wanted to get near enough to knife Bush--metaphorically speaking, of course. As in, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. (Think [i]The Godfather[/i].)
Yesterday on[i] Fox News Sunday[/i], McCain whacked Bush on Iraq. He accused Bush of making "serious mistakes after the initial successes by not having enough troops there on the ground, by allowing the looting, by not securing the borders. There was a number of things that we did. Most of it can be traced back to not having sufficient numbers of troops there." When he said "we," McCain actually meant Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice." He noted that the Bush administration has allowed insurgents to establish sanctuaries--such as in Falluja--where anti-American rebels or terrorists can be trained and harbored. McCain, saying he still supports the US mission in Iraq, was making a serious charge: that Bush and his gang have screwed things up tremendously.
Anchor Chris Wallace then asked what seemed to be a Bush-friendly question: "Some have suggested that what we're seeing, to use a Vietnam analogy, is kind of a rolling Tet offensive to try to break the will of the American and Iraqi people and to play a role in defeating President Bush. Do you think that's what's going on."
While other GOPers have tried to make such a point to shore up support for Bush among potential voters, McCain would not. "I don't think they're interested so much," he replied, "in defeating President Bush."
[b]Source:[/b]
David Corn, [i]Capital Games[/i], The Nation, http://www.thenation.com
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| ...---... Bush FINALLY Agrees to Debates - but Leaves 'Worming Out of it' Room ...---... |
| 09.20.04 (9:23 am) [edit] |
"If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times." - Mark Twain
[i][b]Reuters[/b][/i] reports http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/... : "Bush and Kerry have tentatively agreed to three face-to-face debates, according to source familiar with the negotiations. The debates, beginning September 30, could prove pivotal in the closely fought November 2 election, and in an effort to lower voters' expectations, each side in recent weeks has already begun to portray the other as having the stronger debater. [This is news to the Kerry campaign! Bet this one was a Rove ploy - make it look like BOTH sides, not just him, was hedging bets!]. The source familiar with the negotiations said the Bush campaign had tentatively agreed to the full complement of debates recommended by the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates." But Rove is leaving worming out room, because as soon as they "tentatively agreed" just to make the Commission deadline, the Bush campaign issued a statement that "No agreement has been reached." These slippery creeps are like the worse grade of used car salesmen!
Also refer to "Bush Avoiding Debates???" on http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ...---... Bush/Cheney's Forgeries: Pentagon Under-reporting Casualties ...---... |
| 09.20.04 (8:27 am) [edit] |
[b]Since the neo-cons are in a hysterical fit over the Killian memos used by Dan Rather on [i]60 Minutes[/i], claiming that they are forgeries, although[i] the actual content of the memos is true and accurate[/i] and Killian's secretary Ms. Knox typed memos[i] just like them[/i]-- perhaps these hypocritical right-wing mad-dogs might want to address the following forgeries by the Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i]:[/b]
[b]PENTAGON UNDER-REPORTING IRAQ CASUALTIES[/b]
THIS ARTICLE APPEARED IN PAKISTAN TODAY http://www.dawn.com/2004/09/2... and reports that 17,000 U.S. soldiers are not listed on the Pentagon's casualty list.
This piece is based on Mark Benjamin's http://about.upi.com/journali... UPI article. Benjamin also brought the lariam/suicidal http://www.thewashingtonnote.... behavior by some U.S. Special Forces to light.
Key points from Mark Benjamin's article:
[i]-- Nearly 17,000 service members medically evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan are absent from public Pentagon casualty reports
-- In addition to those evacuations, 32,684 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan now out of the military sought medical attention from the Department of Veterans Affairs
-- The military has evacuated 16,765 individual service members from Iraq and Afghanistan for injuries and ailments not directly related to combat
-- The Pentagon has reported 1,019 dead and 7,245 wounded from Iraq. And 27,571 of the veterans who have sought health care from the VA served in Iraq
-- Among veterans from Iraq seeking help from the VA, 5,375 have been diagnosed with a mental problem, making it the third-leading diagnosis after bone problems and digestive problems. Among the mental problems were 800 soldiers who became psychotic[/i].
Benjamin quotes a number of veteran's advocates who complain that the Pentagon is too narrowly defining its reported casualties from the war.
I think they have a point. And this is only on the U.S. side of the equation.
There are some NGOs actively involved in trying to assess Iraqi casualties, but one site is here.
With such little oversight from Congress and most of the media, the Pentagon is getting away with making affairs in Iraq look far less horrible than they are.
[b]Source:[/b]
TomPaine, http://www.tompaine.com
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| ...---... Bush Avoiding Debates??? ...---... |
| 09.19.04 (4:25 pm) [edit] |
"To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice." - Confucius
"Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning, but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat." - George Eliot
"The greatest braggarts are usually the biggest cowards." - Jean Jacques Rousseau
[b]Bush is a coward ... The RNC is desperately seeking ways out for Bush not to debate without it causing the cowardly A'W'OL deserter any damage ... Are the American people willing to be so easily duped??? ...[/b]
Though news reports and a letter from officials aim to be "objective" about the two candidates' positions on the upcoming presidential debates, the truth of the matter is that Kerry has readily agreed http://www.washingtonpost.com... to dates, times, locations, and moderators of debates. Bush on the other hand is seems to be stonewalling the commission and is meeting with the Kerry campaign in a last-minute effort to make other arrangements.
Writing in the[i] American Prospect[/i] http://www.prospect.org/web/p... , Rob Garver submits a modest proposal for dealing with the Bush's reluctance to simply stand up and defend his policies:
... "Inform both campaigns that the commission will be sponsoring three debates, the times, dates, and formats of which have already been announced. There will be a seat and a nameplate for each candidate; if only one of them shows up, he gets to answer the moderator’s questions all by himself for 90 minutes, while the cameras show an empty chair where his opponent ought to be." ...
[b]Source:[/b]
AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
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| ...---... The Resort to Force ...---... |
| 09.19.04 (10:39 am) [edit] |
"All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume." - Noam Chomsky
[b]Noam Chomsky is a Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. In addition to Hegemony or Survival, America's Quest for Global Dominance (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books), he is the author of numerous books on linguistics and on U.S. foreign policy. Noam Chomsky writes:[/b]
As Colin Powell explained the National Security Strategy (NSS) of September 2002 to a hostile audience at the World Economic Forum, Washington has a "sovereign right to use force to defend ourselves" from nations that possess WMD and cooperate with terrorists, the official pretexts for invading Iraq. The collapse of the pretexts is well known, but there has been insufficient attention to its most important consequence: the NSS was effectively revised to lower the bars to aggression. The need to establish ties to terror was quietly dropped. More significant, Bush and colleagues declared the right to resort to force even if a country does not have WMD or even programs to develop them. It is sufficient that it have the "intent and ability" to do so. Just about every country has the ability, and intent is in the eye of the beholder. The official doctrine, then, is that anyone is subject to overwhelming attack. Colin Powell carried the revision even a step further. The president was right to attack Iraq because Saddam not only had "intent and capability" but had "actually used such horrible weapons against his enemies in Iran and against his own people" - with continuing support from Powell and his associates, he failed to add, following the usual convention. Condoleezza Rice gave a similar version. With such reasoning as this, who is exempt from attack? Small wonder that, as one Reuters report put it, "if Iraqis ever see Saddam Hussein in the dock, they want his former American allies shackled beside him."
In the desperate flailing to contrive justifications as one pretext after another collapsed, the obvious reason for the invasion was conspicuously evaded by the administration and commentators: to establish the first secure military bases in a client state right at the heart of the world's major energy resources, understood since World War II to be a "stupendous source of strategic power" and expected to become even more important in the future. There should have been little surprise at revelations that the administration intended to attack Iraq before 9-11, and downgraded the "war on terror" in favor of this objective. In internal discussion, evasion is unnecessary. Long before they took office, the private club of reactionary statists had recognized that "the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." With all the vacillations of policy since the current incumbents first took office in 1981, one guiding principle remains stable: the Iraqi people must not rule Iraq.
The 2002 National Security Strategy, and its implementation in Iraq, are widely regarded as a watershed in international affairs. "The new approach is revolutionary," Henry Kissinger wrote, approving of the doctrine but with tactical reservations and a crucial qualification: it cannot be "a universal principle available to every nation." The right of aggression is to be reserved for the US and perhaps its chosen clients. We must reject the most elementary of moral truisms, the principle of universality - a stand usually concealed in professions of virtuous intent and tortured legalisms.
Arthur Schlesinger agreed that the doctrine and implementation were "revolutionary," but from a quite different standpoint. As the first bombs fell on Baghdad, he recalled FDR's words following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, "a date which will live in infamy." Now it is Americans who live in infamy, he wrote, as their government adopts the policies of imperial Japan. He added that George Bush had converted a "global wave of sympathy" for the US into a "global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism." A year later, "discontent with America and its policies had intensified rather than diminished." Even in Britain support for the war had declined by a third.
As predicted, the war increased the threat of terror. Middle East expert Fawaz Gerges found it "simply unbelievable how the war has revived the appeal of a global jihadi Islam that was in real decline after 9-11." Recruitment for the Al Qaeda networks increased, while Iraq itself became a "terrorist haven" for the first time. Suicide attacks for the year 2003 reached the highest level in modern times; Iraq suffered its first since the thirteenth century. Substantial specialist opinion concluded that the war also led to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
As the anniversary of the invasion approached, New York's Grand Central Station was patrolled by police with submachine guns, a reaction to the March 11 Madrid train bombings that killed 200 people in Europe's worst terrorist crime. A few days later, the Spanish electorate voted out the government that had gone to war despite overwhelming popular opposition. Spaniards were condemned for appeasing terrorism by voting for withdrawing troops from Iraq in the absence of UN authorization - that is, for taking a stand rather like that of 70 percent of Americans, who called for the UN to take the leading role in Iraq.
Bush assured Americans that "The world is safer today because, in Iraq, our coalition ended a regime that cultivated ties to terror while it built weapons of mass destruction." The president's handlers know that every word is false, but they also know that lies can become Truth, if repeated insistently enough.
There is broad agreement among specialists on how to reduce the threat of terror - keeping here to the subcategory that is doctrinally acceptable, their terror against us - and also on how to incite terrorist atrocities, which may become truly horrendous. The consensus is well articulated by Jason Burke in his study of the Al Qaeda phenomenon, the most detailed and informed investigation of this loose array of radical Islamists for whom bin Laden is hardly more than a symbol (a more dangerous one after he is killed, perhaps, becoming a martyr who inspires others to join his cause). The role of Washington's current incumbents, in their Reaganite phase, in creating the radical Islamist networks is well known. Less familiar is their tolerance of Pakistan's slide toward radical Islamist extremism and its development of nuclear weapons.
As Burke reviews, Clinton's 1998 bombings of Sudan and Afghanistan created bin Laden as a symbol, forged close relations between him and the Taliban, and led to a sharp increase in support, recruitment, and financing for Al Qaeda, which until then was virtually unknown. The next major contribution to the growth of Al Qaeda and the prominence of bin Laden was Bush's bombing of Afghanistan following September 11, undertaken without credible pretext as later quietly conceded. As a result, bin Laden's message "spread among tens of millions of people, particularly the young and angry, around the world," Burke writes, reviewing the increase in global terror and the creation of "a whole new cadre of terrorists" enlisted in what they see as a "cosmic struggle between good and evil," a vision shared by bin Laden and Bush. As noted, the invasion of Iraq had the same effect.
Citing many examples, Burke concludes that "Every use of force is another small victory for bin Laden," who "is winning," whether he lives or dies. Burke's assessment is widely shared by many analysts, including former heads of Israeli military intelligence and the General Security Services.
There is also a broad consensus on what the proper reaction to terrorism should be. It is two-pronged: directed at the terrorists themselves and at the reservoir of potential support. The appropriate response to terrorist crimes is police work, which has been successful worldwide. More important is the broad constituency the terrorists - who see themselves as a vanguard - seek to mobilize, including many who hate and fear them but nevertheless see them as fighting for a just cause. We can help the vanguard mobilize this reservoir of support by violence, or can address the "myriad grievances," many legitimate, that are "the root causes of modern Islamic militancy." That can significantly reduce the threat of terror, and should be undertaken independently of this goal.
Violence can succeed, as Americans know well from the conquest of the national territory. But at terrible cost. It can also provoke violence in response, and often does. Inciting terror is not the only illustration. Others are even more hazardous.
In February 2004, Russia carried out its largest military exercises in two decades, prominently exhibiting advanced WMD. Russian generals and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov announced that they were responding to Washington's plans "to make nuclear weapons an instrument of solving military tasks," including its development of new low-yield nuclear weapons, "an extremely dangerous tendency that is undermining global and regional stability,... lowering the threshold for actual use." Strategic analyst Bruce Blair writes that Russia is well aware that the new "bunker busters" are designed to target the "high-level nuclear command bunkers" that control its nuclear arsenal. Ivanov and Russian generals report that in response to US escalation they are deploying "the most advanced state-of-the-art missile in the world," perhaps next to impossible to destroy, something that "would be very alarming to the Pentagon," says former Assistant Defense Secretary Phil Coyle. US analysts suspect that Russia may also be duplicating US development of a hypersonic cruise vehicle that can re-enter the atmosphere from space and launch devastating attacks without warning, part of US plans to reduce reliance on overseas bases or negotiated access to air routes.
US analysts estimate that Russian military expenditures have tripled during the Bush-Putin years, in large measure a predicted reaction to the Bush administration's militancy and aggressiveness. Putin and Ivanov cited the Bush doctrine of "preemptive strike" - the "revolutionary" new doctrine of the National Security Strategy - but also "added a key detail, saying that military force can be used if there is an attempt to limit Russia's access to regions that are essential to its survival," thus adapting for Russia the Clinton doctrine that the US is entitled to resort to "unilateral use of military power" to ensure "uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources." The world "is a much more insecure place" now that Russia has decided to follow the US lead, said Fiona Hill of the Brookings Institution, adding that other countries presumably "will follow suit."
In the past, Russian automated response systems have come within a few minutes of launching a nuclear strike, barely aborted by human intervention. By now the systems have deteriorated. US systems, which are much more reliable, are nevertheless extremely hazardous. They allow three minutes for human judgment after computers warn of a missile attack, as they frequently do. The Pentagon has also found serious flaws in its computer security systems that might allow terrorist hackers to seize control and simulate a launch - "an accident waiting to happen," Bruce Blair writes. The dangers are being consciously escalated by the threat and use of violence.
Concern is not eased by the recent discovery that US presidents have been "systematically misinformed" about the effects of nuclear war. The level of destruction has been "severely underestimated" because of lack of systematic oversight of the "insulated bureaucracies" that provide analyses of "limited and 'winnable' nuclear war"; the resulting "institutional myopia can be catastrophic," far more so than the manipulation of intelligence on Iraq.
The Bush administration slated the initial deployment of a missile defense system for summer 2004, a move criticized as "completely political," employing untested technology at great expense. A more appropriate criticism is that the system might seem workable; in the logic of nuclear war, what counts is perception. Both US planners and potential targets regard missile defense as a first-strike weapon, intended to provide more freedom for aggression, including nuclear attack. And they know how the US responded to Russia's deployment of a very limited ABM system in 1968: by targeting the system with nuclear weapons to ensure that it would be instantly overwhelmed. Analysts warn that current US plans will also provoke a Chinese reaction. History and the logic of deterrence "remind us that missile defense systems are potent drivers of offensive nuclear planning," and the Bush initiative will again raise the threat to Americans and to the world.
China's reaction may set off a ripple effect through India, Pakistan, and beyond. In West Asia, Washington is increasing the threat posed by Israel's nuclear weapons and other WMD by providing Israel with more than one hundred of its most advanced jet bombers, accompanied by prominent announcements that the bombers can reach Iran and return and are an advanced version of the US planes Israel used to destroy an Iraqi reactor in 1981. The Israeli press adds that the US is providing the Israeli air force with "'special' weaponry." There can be little doubt that Iranian and other intelligence services are watching closely and perhaps giving a worst-case analysis: that these may be nuclear weapons. The leaks and dispatch of the aircraft may be intended to rattle the Iranian leadership, perhaps to provoke some action that can be used as a pretext for an attack.
Immediately after the National Security Strategy was announced in September 2002, the US moved to terminate negotiations on an enforceable bioweapons treaty and to block international efforts to ban biowarfare and the militarization of space. A year later, at the UN General Assembly, the US voted alone against implementation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and alone with its new ally India against steps toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. The US voted alone against "observance of environmental norms" in disarmament and arms control agreements and alone with Israel and Micronesia against steps to prevent nuclear proliferation in the Middle East - the pretext for invading Iraq. A resolution to prevent militarization of space passed 174 to 0, with four abstentions: US, Israel, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands. As discussed earlier, a negative US vote or abstention amounts to a double veto: the resolution is blocked and is eliminated from reporting and history.
Bush planners know as well as others that the resort to force increases the threat of terror, and that their militaristic and aggressive posture and actions provoke reactions that increase the risk of catastrophe. They do not desire these outcomes, but assign them low priority in comparison to the international and domestic agendas they make little attempt to conceal.
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| ...---... Playing Golf with the Bushies ...---... |
| 09.19.04 (7:01 am) [edit] |
"Of all the causes which conspire to blind Man's erring judgment, and misguide the mind; What the weak head with strongest bias rules, - Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools" - Alexander Pope
[b]Matt Lauer is a fool: a toady for the Bushies, and a rude, biased mad-dog who tries to bully anyone who doesn't suck-up to the corrupt Bush regime ...[/b]
James Devitt at the Gadflyer points to http://gadflyer.com/flytrap/i... an interesting reason for Matt Lauer's blistering treatment of Kitty Kelley on the Today Show: "Kelley, after undergoing intense questions from Lauer that not-so-vaguely resembled Bush re-election campaign talking points, responded, 'Matt, you play golf with the former President Bush.'"
But guess what Devitt found when he performed a Lexis-Nexis search. A New York Daily News headline from May 26, 2004: "Lauer & Ex-Prez Bush Link Up On Golf Course"
[b]Sources:[/b]
AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
Kitty's Litter, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ...---... Eclipsed in Iraq ...---... |
| 09.18.04 (2:26 pm) [edit] |
"It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." - Albert Einstein
[b]The United States is losing in Iraq – literally losing territory and population to the other side. But who is going to tell the American voters?[/b]
The presidential pageant has now risen full in the sky and is blocking out the sun. Until November, we dwell in a weird half-light, stumbling into spooky shadows but shielded from the harsh glare of the nation's actual circumstances. Down is up, fiction is truth, momentous realities are made to disappear from the public mind. The 2004 spectacle is not the first to mislead grossly and exploit emotional weaknesses in the national character. But this time the consequences will be especially grim.
The United States is "losing" in Iraq, literally losing territory and population to the other side. Careful readers of the leading newspapers may know this, but I doubt most voters do. How could they, given the martial self-congratulations of the President and relative restraint from his opponent? High-minded pundits tell us not to dwell on the long-ago past. But the cruel irony of 2004 is that Vietnam is the story. The arrogance and deceit – the utter waste of human life, ours and theirs – play before us once again. A frank discussion will have to wait until after the election.
Several Sundays ago, an ominous article appeared in the opinion section of the New York Times : "One by One, Iraqi Cities Become No-Go Zones." Falluja, Samarra, Ramadi, Karbala, the Sadr City slums of Baghdad – these and other population centers are now controlled by various insurgencies and essentially ceded by US forces. This situation would make a joke of the national elections planned for January. Yet, if U.S. troops try to recapture the lost cities, the bombing and urban fighting would produce massive killing and destruction, further poisoning politics for the U.S. occupation and its puppet government in Saigon – sorry, Baghdad.
Three days later, the story hit page one when anonymous Pentagon officials confirmed the reality. Not to worry, they said: The United States is training and expanding the infant Iraqi army so it can do the fighting for us. That's the ticket – Vietnamization. I remember how well General Westmoreland articulated the strategy back in the 1960s, when war's progress was measured by official "body counts" and reports on "new" fighting forces on the way.
But this time Washington decided the United States couldn't wait for "Iraqization," a strategy that might sound limp-wristed to American voters. The U.S. bombing and assaults quickly resumed. The Bush White House is thus picking targets and second-guessing field commanders, just as Lyndon Johnson did forty years ago in Indochina. Bush is haunted by the mordant remark a US combat officer once made in Vietnam: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."
Meanwhile, Bush's war is destroying the U.S. Army, just as LBJ's war did. After Vietnam, military leaders and Richard Nixon wisely abolished the draft and opted for an all-volunteer force. When this war ends, the volunteer army will be in ruins and a limited draft lottery may be required to fill out the ranks. After Iraq, men and women will get out of uniform in large numbers, especially as they grasp the futility of their sacrifices. Yet Bush's on-the-cheap warmaking against a weak opponent demonstrates that a larger force structure is needed to sustain his policy of pre-emptive war. Kerry says he wants 40,000 more troops, just in case. Old generals doubt Congress would pay for it, given the deficits.
Iraq is Vietnam standing in the mirror. John Kerry, if he had it in him, could lead a national teach-in – re-educate those who have forgotten or prettified their memories but especially inform younger voters who weren't around for the national shame a generation ago. Kerry could describe in plain English what's unfolding now in Iraq and what must be done to find a way out with honor. In other words, be a truth-teller while holding Bush accountable.
Kerry won't go there, probably couldn't without enduring still greater anger. His war-hero campaign biography inadvertently engendered slanderous attacks and still-smoldering resentments. Kerry, like other establishment Dems, originally calculated that the party should be as pro-war as Bush, thus freeing him to run on other issues. That gross miscalculation leaves him proffering a lame "solution" – persuading France, Germany and others to send their troops into this quagmire. Not bloody likely, as the Brits say.
Bush can't go near the truth for obvious reasons. If elected, he faces only bad choices – bomb the bejeezus out of Iraq, as Nixon bombed Vietnam and Cambodia, or bug out under the cover of artful lies. The one thing Bush's famous "resolve" cannot achieve is success at war. Never mind, he aims to win the election instead.
So this presidential contest resembles a grotesque, media-focused war in which two sides skirmish for the attention of ill-informed voters. Bush won big back when he got Iraq off the front pages and evening news with his phony hand-off of sovereignty and his chest-thumping convention. But then his opponents – the hostile insurgents in Iraq – struck back brilliantly and managed to put the war story back in the lead on the news (might we expect from them an "October surprise" of deadlier proportions?). In this fight, Kerry is like a bystander who might benefit from bad news but can't wish for it. Most combat correspondents, with brave exceptions, hesitate to step back from daily facts and tell the larger truth. Maybe they are afraid to sound partial.
The timing of events in Iraq does not fit propitiously with the election calendar. A majority has already concluded that it was a mistake to fight this war, but public credulity is not yet destroyed. A majority still wants to believe the strategy may yet succeed, that Iraq won't become another dark stain in our history books. During Vietnam, the process of giving up on such wishful thinking took many years. The breaking point came in 1968, when a majority turned against the war. LBJ withdrew from running for re-election. Nixon won that year with his "secret plan" to win the peace. The war continued for another five years. US casualties doubled.
This time, public opinion has moved much faster against the war, but perhaps not fast enough. People naturally are reluctant to conclude that their country did the wrong thing, that young people died for a pointless cause. If the war story does stay hot and high on front pages, a collapse of faith might occur in time for this election, but more likely it will come later. Nixon won a landslide re-election in 1972 with his election-eve announcement that peace was at hand, the troops were coming home. In the hands of skilled manipulators, horrendous defeat can be turned into honorable victory. Temporarily at least. When the enemy eventually triumphed in Indochina, Nixon was already gone, driven out for other crimes.
[b]Sources:[/b]
William Greider, The Nation, http://www.thenation.com
The Pinocchio President, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Yesterday's Men, and Tomorrow's, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Reality Check Badly Needed, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Not Walking the Walk, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Gates of Hell, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Out of Control, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ...---... Republicans Slam Bush ...---... |
| 09.18.04 (6:42 am) [edit] |
"People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election." - Otto von Bismark
[b]Never before have we had such an insane liar as George W. Bush occupying the White House ... Even GOP senators http://www.cincypost.com/2004... are calling for Bush to stop lying to the American people regarding his bloody neo-con fiasco in Iraq that is getting much worse, not better ...[/b]
As we noted http://www.alternet.org/waron... this week, the Bush administration has asked Congress for authorization to divert money allocated to Iraqi reconstruction to pay for the occupation. Well, the request received an unpleasant response http://www.usatoday.com/news/... from two top GOP senators on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Chuck Hagel and Dick Lugar, USA TODAY reports:
"Of the $18.4 billion Congress approved last year for Iraqi reconstruction, only $1.1 billion has been spent because of violence and other problems. Hagel called that record 'beyond pitiful and embarrassing; it is now in the zone of dangerous.' Even Lugar, who is not usually given to strong rhetoric, said the failure to inject funds into the Iraqi economy quickly was 'exasperating for anybody looking at this from any vantage point.'"
[b]Sources:[/b]
Yesterday's Men, and Tomorrow's, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Reality Check Badly Needed, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Not Walking the Walk, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Gates of Hell, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Out of Control, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ...---... "The Bush Administration Governs by Fear" ...---... |
| 09.17.04 (4:17 pm) [edit] |
"Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness." - James Thurber
[b]LeMonde Interview with Corey Robin, Political Science Professor at the City University of New York. Three years after the September 11 attacks, a month of "national preparation" has been decreed.[/b]
[b]You just published a political history of fear ([i]Fear, The History of a Political Idea[/i], Oxford University Press). While American commemorates the September 11, 2001 attacks, the authorities have decreed a month of "national preparation" so that Americans know how to face emergency situations.[/b]
[b]The media are evoking what would happen in the case of a nuclear attack on New York...Must we be afraid?[/b]
No. Just look at the statistics. We have higher chances of dying in a car accident than in a terrorist attack. There are roughly 40,000 deaths a year on American roads and many of those could be avoided. Fear is a highly ideological emotion. Contrary to what people believe, it is not an automatic response to danger. If that were the case, then we'd be afraid on the highway. We are, in fact, dependant on what our public and private leaders define as danger or threat. That said, I do not say that Al-Qaeda is not a danger. We all know that it is. However, for me, it's a kind of moral principle: I refuse to let the government dictate to me what I should be afraid of.
[b]Do you feel the Bush administration uses fear as a political weapon?[/b]
Yes. I don't think that there is political manipulation of fear itself, but the administration governs by fear. Its members don't hide that. Vice President Cheney asserted that voting for John Kerry increased the terrorist risk. His comments provoked a clamor of indignation, but they are altogether in line with what the Bush administration has maintained since September 11, 2001. Fear is the basis for the Republican's electoral attraction. Already in January, a Bush team official had confided to The New York Times: the campaign will include "the fear factor"...but that's only one piece of the picture. If you look at political decisions, the use of fear is altogether as obvious. There's nothing like it to neutralize opposition. After the attacks, the administration created a department of domestic security. It's an enormous bureaucracy that includes as many as 180,000 employees. They don't have the right to form unions. Among these employees are watchmen, cafeteria workers, secretaries. "We must be as agile as Al-Qaeda": that's what they're told by way of explanation. They're refused any kind of union protection in the name of national security!
[b]Will the situation change with a Democratic president?[/b]
Not necessarily. On this subject, the Democrats have a tendency to copy. Did you see the Democratic convention? The first thing John Kerry did when he arrived was a military salute. He tries to tell us that he's a tough guy, that he'll protect us as well as Bush - if not better. Fear has become practically the only public language.
[b]Did you begin your book after September 11, 2001?[/b]
No, well before. I got interested in McCarthyism first. I tried to understand how such a phenomenon could have occurred. At that time, the fear was of communism. The government, in fact, only prosecuted a few hundred people. But in the private sector, the figures were astronomical: 40% of American employees were investigated. The United States may be the country of freedom of expression, but not in the workplace.
According to Human Rights Watch - an organization that defends human rights - 200,000 employees were fired in the last decade because of their union activities. September 11 did not change everything. It brought things to the surface that had been simmering for a long time. Today you'll find brochures on the precautions to take against terrorism in Starbucks -a coffee house chain. What does that have to do with drinking a cup of coffee? That too, is the politics of fear. Many profit from it, especially in the private sector.
[b]And there are also intellectuals who are happy to scare themselves! [/b]
Yes: a certain number of chroniclers have found that September 11 has reinvigorated us. In the 1990s life was almost too comfortable for their taste. We were becoming too soft. According to them, fear was a salutary aspect. It electrifies. People are vibrant, alert. It returns us to our values. After Clinton and his sexual adventures, we went back to believing in something. It reminds me of the French intellectuals before the First World War, euphoric at the prospect of combat.
[b]How far back does the political history of fear go?[/b]
I open my book with Genesis! In fact, I observe that societies turn to fear during times that correspond with a loss of confidence in political ideals. That may happen after a war, after a political battle, a crisis. People no longer know what is good, what is right, but they know what is bad. Fear becomes an antidote to despair. That happened in France after Napoleon's fall. In the United States, we experienced the same phenomenon at the end of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and also at the end of the Cold War.
[b]Source:[/b]
TruthOut, LeMonde, http://www.truthout.org/docs_...
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| ...---... Iraq Casualties: US Wounded in Iraq Will Hit New High for Second Month in a Row ...---... |
| 09.17.04 (9:03 am) [edit] |
[b]The despotic, depraved and despicable Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] are losing the war on terror http://www.tblog.com/template... and losing the war in Iraq http://www.tblog.com/template... [i] too [/i]...[/b]
Bush's resolute incompetence on Iraq is overwhelming--like driving 80 in the fog. While we know that US military deaths continue at an alarming rate, items in DailyKos.com and globalsecurity.org show that the number of US soldiers being WOUNDED in Iraq that is now soaring to unprecedented levels. After over 1100 US troops were wounded in August--a monthly wounded level over 200 soldiers higher than any previous month, the projected level of wounded US soldiers in September is running at an estimated level of over 1500. By comparison, only 850 US soldiers TOTAL were wounded in the first three months of Gulf War II, which led up to Bush's declaration of "victory." So by the end of September, over three times more soldiers will have been wounded in the last two months than were wounded in the three months of the "active" war with Iraq.
Refer to "U.S. Casualties in Iraq" by GlobalSecurity.org on http://www.globalsecurity.org...
[b]Sources:[/b]
Losing the Battle with Terror, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Not Walking the Walk, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Think Again: Meanwhile, in the Real World..., http://www.tblog.com/template...
Out of Control, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ...---... Losing the Battle with Terror ...---... |
| 09.17.04 (6:18 am) [edit] |
[b]Three years after the 9/11 attacks, Americans are less safe than ever, both at home and abroad.[/b]
George W. Bush's avowed efforts to combat terrorism have weakened international institutions and squandered global goodwill toward the U.S.
The Iraq War has actually spawned a new front in what Bush likes to label as the U.S. war on terror, and provided a handy recruiting tool for terrorists while diverting resources from essential measures needed to ensure the nation's security.
Picture this: the U.S. government spends more every three days on the Iraq war than it has in three years on the security of the country's 361 commercial seaports.
As it lards up military spending to wage the Iraq War, the administration's 2004 budget cut $2 billion from crime prevention and public safety programs. The proposed 2005 budget slashed $805 million from emergency responders. Federal, state, and local first responder funding will fall short by about $100 billion over the next five years, according to a Council on Foreign Relations report.
A full two-thirds of the increase in the 2003 Pentagon budget funded programs and activities that are largely irrelevant to homeland security or counterterrorism operations, according to the Center for Defense Information.
In terms of homeland security, the Bush administration is endangering the lives of Americans with its reluctance to force companies to take actions to meet potential threats. About 85 percent of the nation's critical infrastructure is owned or controlled by the private sector.
When it comes to protecting the people who live near the country's chemical factories or power plants, safety guidelines are either inadequate or purely voluntary and important steps to safeguard the population are not being taken. The chemical industry has stalled any efforts at increasing security at the 123 facilities where a release of chemicals could threaten more than one million people.
As a further result of lax enforcement, 70 percent of the ports slated to meet container security standards did not meet the July 1, 2004 target.
Need more reasons to watch your back?
In August, Shaun Marshall, a medic for U.S. military contractor DynCorp was stopped at Kennedy airport after having flown from Afghanistan with explosives in his luggage. Port Authority police let him proceed with this small arsenal to his final destination in California after he claimed that the explosives were for training purposes. FBI agents later arrested him after Dyncorp denied that Marshall was involved in training exercises.
Just as alarmingly, three years after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government has not yet created a unified terrorist watchlist to guide law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
The underlying problem with the Bush White House's efforts is that it has paid scant attention to root causes of international terrorism, including the social and political contexts that foster the rise of militancy. These include repressive regimes, failed states, and the poverty and inequality that can create conditions of support for terrorist acts.
Here's the bottom line: It doesn't have to be this way.
Terrorism is an ongoing threat that needs to be tackled through a strong, coordinated strategy focused upon strengthening civilian areas of operation. Effective policies would include: shift funds from the Defense Department to port container inspections; expand Coast Guard and Border Patrol programs; put spent reactor fuel into dry hardened storage; establish minimum requirements for improvement of security at chemical plants and industrial facilities; and increase the number of food inspectors and their resources at food processing facilities.
Abroad, the U.S. would become safer from terrorist attack if it were to focus on international cooperation rather than unilateralism. We should fully fund programs that reduce the threat of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons conventions, including the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Fissile Material Control Regime, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
More broadly, the U.S. should enhance its capacity to respond quickly to failing states by expanding support for peacekeeping initiatives through the U.S. Army's Peacekeeping and Stability Operations and expanding military assistance to strengthen other countries' efforts to engage in peacekeeping operations. We must reduce financial and military backing for the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and dependence of the U.S. and its allies on oil imports from repressive governments.
War is the least effective approach to combating terrorism and should represent the last resort. The UK-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, the best-known and most authoritative source of information on global defense capabilities and trends, estimates that worldwide Al Qaeda membership now stands at 18,000 with 1,000 active members in Iraq. According to the ISS, this unnecessary conflict has "accelerated recruitment" for al-Qaida.
In sum, the Bush administration's war on terror has been a failure.
[b]Sources:[/b]
John Gershman is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus for the Interhemispheric Resource Center. He is the primary author of "A Secure America in a Secure World," FPIF's upcoming task force report on terrorism. - http://www.alternet.org/waron...
Not Walking the Walk, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Think Again: Meanwhile, in the Real World..., http://www.tblog.com/template...
Out of Control, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ...---... Two Top Republicans Slam White House Mismanagement of Iraq War: It is 'Beyond Pitiful' ... |
| 09.16.04 (6:10 pm) [edit] |
"Two leading Republican legislators yesterday attacked the Bush administration's approach to rebuilding Iraq, in one of the strongest indictments of the administration's Iraq policy from" the GOP. During a hearing about diverting 20% of Iraqi funds into security, Senator Richard G. Lugar blasted "what he called the 'dancing-in-the-street crowd' that wrongly predicted that Iraqis would be celebrating after the fall of Saddam Hussein a year and a half ago. He said the same White House officials have repeatedly failed to make necessary course changes. 'Now, the nonsense of all [the predictions] is apparent; the lack of planning is apparent,' he said. Senator Chuck Hagel [at the same hearing] said the pace of reconstruction has been 'beyond pitiful. It's embarrassing. It is now in the zone of dangerous.' "
Refer to "Two GOP leaders attack Iraq policy - Lugar and Hagel cite slow pace of reconstruction" on http://www.boston.com/news/wo...
[b]Why isn't the GOP leadership calling for the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta's[/i] impeachment???[/b]
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| ...---... A Short-List: Ten Things I Hate About Bush ...---... |
| 09.16.04 (1:54 pm) [edit] |
[b]How do I hate thee let me count the ways... [/b]It seems that writing this column would be easy after all, what isn't there to hate about our appointed leader? But, my dear reader, it is much much harder than you would think. For instance where do I start? Do I go with the obvious hatreds, or do I explore more deeply what it is about the man that makes so many of us hate him so. I've decided one column would not do my hatred justice therefore I will be writing a weekly list of the things that make the W so hated.
This week I'll begin with the man himself as a person, as a so-called fellow human. Columns to follow will include: W on the environment, politically, militarily and a host of other reasons. If you dear reader have something you want included on a list send it to me and I will try to include it in upcoming article. Here we go:
1. English is his second language. If you have heard him speak you will know that his command of the English language can only be described as colorful.
2. Talks the talk, but can't walk the walk. Our commander in thief, I mean chief is very willing to talk tough and act like a bad ass. But, as we all know, this stay at home GI did not only sit out his turn to defend the nation (although the merits of fighting in Vietnam make it hard to fault anyone for skipping out on it) he also managed to be a deserter on top of it.
3. He is an unrepentant liar. If we had a nickel for every lie he tells we would be able to pay off the national debt.
4. Pretends he can speak "Mexican". If you sat through his convention speech you will know that he intends to (in one translation) "Leave no child without a makeover". "No dejaremos ningun nino atroz"?
5. Calls himself compassionate. No other governor has executed more people on death row than the W. His brother Jeb (the one who delivered Florida) is his only close second. As he said in an interview "Texas has never executed a guilty... I mean innocent person."
6. The idiot smirk. Every time he is on TV and manages to string more than four words in a coherent sentence he gets the same delighted look of a retarded child finishing the ABC song. He is not in special ed, the right insists, but he sure looks it.
7. Connecticut blue blood pretends to be Texan. He is well known for criticizing the establishment, but this son of a President is more establishment than any candidate previously in the history of the nation.
8. Will not take responsibility for his actions. When asked, during a rare Q&A with the press, to list one mistake of his administration, this master of the ad-lib could not come up with one. Luckily for him the next day thousands of newspaper articles were more than happy to refresh his memory and list the various and humongous failures of his administration. Should he be willing to let reporters ask him that question again, he now has an archive of failures to choose from.
9. Vacation whore. No other President in the history of the country has gone on more vacations than Shrubby. He is by far the most rested, least encumbered by the running of the nation, President we've ever had. I guess he learned early on in his career that the best way to make sure nothing goes wrong is to be out of town while the big boys made the decisions.
10. Almost whacked by a pretzel. How drunk do you have to be to get your ass kicked by a pretzel? I know, I know, his PR machine says he is now a dry-drunk. But, what is he doing all those months out in his ranch? My guess catching up on some drinking. Sure would explain why he keeps falling off his bike all the time.
[b]Source:[/b]
Alfonso Vistoso, Queens College Knight News, http://www.qcknightnews.com/n...
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| ...---... The Fearful Voter ...---... |
| 09.16.04 (7:16 am) [edit] |
"Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.' - Betrand Russell
[b]Everyone these days has advice for the presidential contender. But what's the campaign to do when fear is the prime motivator of this year's voter?[/b]
Now is the season of unsolicited advice. Every day, pundits tell John Kerry what he must do to right the course of his campaign and cruise toward victory. Morton Kondracke says Kerry must issue a clear declaration that he is willing to stay in Iraq until the United States prevails. Tim Russert notes that Kerry "has to get the emphasis back on the economy, back on the war on Iraq – make the war on Iraq different and distinguishable from the war on terror and make this campaign a referendum on George Bush." Washington Post reporter Dan Balz observes, "He has to focus his message on Iraq in a way he hasn't been able to . . .. He has to figure out a way to get this debate as much as he possibly can on domestic issues." Others offer helpful tips: push health care, bash Bush, produce a plan for cleaning up Bush's mess in Iraq (as if such a plan would be easy to craft).
I try to stay out of the consulting business. My position is that a worthy presidential candidate ought to be able to win without my help. But it is hard to avoid the low-grade panic seeping through anti-Bush circles. The Swift Vets' unsubstantiated but effective attacks on Kerry and the Republicans' successful convention (celebrating Bush as God's choice to lead a holy war against terrorists) have spooked Dems. They look with fear at the poll numbers – most of which are trending in favor of Bush – and they do not see (within the media coverage of the campaign) strong indications of a kick-ass Kerry campaign. And they justifiably fret and frantically toss out advice. I feel their pain.
But if I were inclined to hurl my own two cents at the Kerry campaign, I do not know what specific advice I would provide. It seems that his campaign and the Bush effort exist in alternate universes. Bush is pushing buttons, and Kerry is trying to score debating points. Saddled with a costly and no-end-in-sight war that he launched under false pretenses – and that most of the public has come to consider a mistake – Bush has made the strategic decision to hail this war as proof he is a strong and decisive leader who can be counted upon to take action (even misguided action!) to protect America. He is promoting fear – or the freedom from it. He is identifying himself and his personal attributes (swagger and all) with the security of the country. What could be a bigger or better message than vote for me and I will keep you safe? As psychologists at Stanford University recently noted after studying 7000 voters who participated in the 2000 election, fear was the number-one motivation for these voters. And that was before 9/11.
Kerry's retort to Bush (and note that it is more parry than thrust) is that W. was "wrong" to launch this war – and "wrong" to promote tax cuts for the rich, "wrong" to neglect the health care crisis, "wrong" to stand by while manufacturing jobs disappeared, "wrong" to do nothing to preserve the ban on assault weapons, "wrong" to let the situation in North Korea deteriorate before addressing it. Kerry is correct on policy grounds. But his critique lacks the psychological punch of Bush's vote-for-me-or-die argument. On one level, Kerry is saying that Bush's decisions have endangered the nation. But he sure ain't saying it on the level where Bush (and Dick Cheney) are playing.
The Democratic convention, with its emphasis on Kerry's Vietnam days, was an attempt to tie Kerry's back-story to the present and convince voters he has the chops to be commander-in-chief. At the time, the strategy seemed to work. But it ignored Kerry's years in the Senate (as a fighter for environmental policies, a champion of abortion rights, a foe of tax cuts tilted toward the rich, and a crusader against the illegal contra war, CIA misdeeds and sleazy international bankers supporting terrorists and drug-runners), and it did not spell out how Kerry's positive traits would lead to different policies and better outcomes in the war in Iraq and the so-called war on terrorism. When the Swift Vets unleashed their unfounded attack upon Kerry's Vietnam experience, he was left with little cover. Truth, unfortunately, was not a sufficient defense.
The recent polls spell trouble for Kerry. Not so much because they grant Bush a lead. What should be most disconcerting for Kerry fans are the respondents' attitudes toward the candidates. An Associated Press/Ipsos poll asked registered voters to assess the character of each nominee. Nearly 75 percent said Bush was "strong"; only 54 percent said that of Kerry. Three-quarters called Bush "decisive"; a measly 37 percent applied that term to Kerry. Bush was seen as more likeable. The only character face-off in which Kerry led Bush was intelligence. Eighty-four percent considered Kerry smart; 63 percent reported they believe Bush is "intelligent."
The flip-flop attack mounted by the Bushies seems to have drawn blood. But there's worse news for Kerry. Asked what was a more important priority – "protecting the country" or "creating jobs" – two-thirds went with national security. And who would be better at protecting the country? Bush beat Kerry 59 to 36 percent. Kerry had a smaller lead – 50 to 44 percent – on the jobs-creation match-up.
A Newsweek poll produced similar results. People thought Kerry was smarter, but that Bush was stronger. While the same number – just over half – said that Bush and Kerry were each "honest and ethical," 66 percent said that Bush speaks his mind, but only 45 percent considered Kerry a straight-talker. In this poll, terrorism rated as the leading priority, too. And the respondents trusted Bush to do a better job than Kerry on both the war in Iraq (54 to 39 percent) and the war on terrorism (58 to 34 percent). As for dealing with the economy, Kerry had no advantage over Bush. These numbers were echoed in a Time poll, too. Only 52 percent said they trusted Kerry to lead the war on terrorism. Two-thirds reported they trusted Bush to do so. But here's the kicker: Asked if U.S. actions in Iraq have made the world safer 44 percent said yes, and 46 percent said no. (Back in July, the safer-to not-safer split was worse for Bush: 37 to 55 percent.) So apparently majority of the folks believe that the nation is on the wrong track and that Bush's war in Iraq has been a bust. Yet they see Bush as a strong commander in chief and trust him to carry on.
No one ever said voting was logical.
Given this, what's Kerry to do? How can he demonstrate he is strong and decisive at this point? He may not be able to – at least not in the sense that he can order a bombing raid. With his rational critique of Bush's policies, Kerry can show that he is the smarter Yalie. But apparently being intelligent is not good enough for the average voter. And while Kerry can try to zero in an domestic issues to prove he will be a better deal for American families, the polling data suggests that voters may be more attuned to talk of security than to talk of 401(k)s. Besides, Kerry has to operate within the known media world, and often the national media pay less attention to such wonkish matters as health care coverage. In any event, this is not a contest of one set of policies versus a competing set. It's one guy against another guy.
I don't mean to be a Cassandra. But Kerry is facing tough dynamics at the moment. Kerry-yearners looking for positive signs can take hope from the fact that he is only trailing Bush by five points in a couple of national polls after several awful weeks for him and several great weeks for Bush. And the debates are to come. Still, it is unlikely that Kerry will change the contours of the contest and, say, transform it into a referendum on health care. He must directly address Bush's argument – that is, turn his boat into the incoming fire and fire back. He cannot cede the I-am-stronger turf to Bush. He has to find a way to fight Bush on this psychological territory. That might require a more direct attack on Bush, charging him with botching his primary mission and placing America in a less safe position. Kerry took such shots at Bush during the primaries, but he has not issued such volleys with much force lately. And his less-than-artful explanations of his Iraq position have been a burden he cannot seem to shake.
But I am not giving advice. Outsiders can perhaps help Kerry identify and clarify the severe challenge he faces. But I doubt they can provide him the roadmap to reach the obvious goals. He has to make the connection with voters. He has to address their fears (which are flamed by the Bush camp). He has to convince. And he has to do it soon.
[b]Source:[/b]
[b]David Corn is the Washington editor of The Nation and author of "The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception."[/b], http://www.thenation.com
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| ... Bush Attacks Kerry for Supposed $2 Trillion Price Tag, but Bush Agenda Will Cost $3 Trillion |
| 09.15.04 (3:28 pm) [edit] |
"A Conservative government is an organized hypocrisy" - Benjamin Disraeli
"The value of an idea has nothing whatever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it." - Oscar Wilde
"A hypocrite despises those whom he deceives, but has no respect for himself. He would make a dupe of himself too, if he could." - William Hazlitt
[b]If it weren't for hypocrisy, Bush wouldn't have any values at all.[/b] He's been going around claiming that Kerry's policy proposals will cost two trillion dollars, and that's way to much for the taxpayers to bear. But all the promises Bush made in his convention speech will cost THREE trillion dollars. But the real difference in the their agendas isn't just the total dollars: Kerry will make the billionaires share the cost, while Bush will shift even more of the cost away from his buddies and onto the middle class.
Read "$3 Trillion Price Tag Left Out As Bush Details His Agenda" on http://www.washingtonpost.com...
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| ...---... Kitty's Litter ...---... |
| 09.15.04 (11:56 am) [edit] |
[b]Kitty Kelley's take on the Bush dynasty: consistently cold, calculating, predatory and unscrupulous, generation after generation. In other words, her book is a rollicking good read.[/b]
Kitty Kelley's "explosive" nearly 700-page tome on the Bushes, [i]The Family[/i], has been barely out on the streets for a day, but the early news reactions have already made it plain: The sprawling biography simply doesn't matter. The predominant media take on this book is likely to go something like this: In Bush tome, unreliable menopausal scandalmonger again misses mark; world waits out irritating media buzz.
But that doesn't mean the book isn't worth a read – far from it.
Kelley's book is – unintentionally I think – a surprisingly tender portrait of a small, loyal group of vicious undead fiends, persevering against all odds in a world of the callous, uncomprehending living. Kelley does what no other writer to date has really done for the Bushes: she actually makes you admire them for their remarkable ability to remain consistently cold, calculating, predatory and unscrupulous in generation after generation after generation.
In one of the great laugh lines of this or any other biography, Kelley sums up the Bush charm by quoting (third-hand, mind you – there's that damn credibility thing again!) none other than Richard Nixon:
[i]The writer Gore Vidal recalled a conversation with his friend Murray Kempton shortly after one of the journalist's periodic lunches with Murray Kempton. Kempton had mentioned George Bush [Sr.], and according to Vidal, Nixon had responded: "Total light-weight. Nothing there – sort of person you appoint to things – but now that Barbara, she's something else again! She's really vindictive!" Vidal characterized the comment as "the highest Nixonian compliment[/i]."
But then Richard Nixon hadn't met W.
Kelley's book covers some six generations of Bushes in some detail, focusing primarily on the Big Three: Prescott, George H.W., and George W. It is less an intergenerational saga than a breathtaking tale of genealogical one-upmanship in which each successive Bush child strives to indelibly stamp the family name on some previously unconquered region of human iniquity. Each successive Bush is Worst of All in his own way.
The title of Meanest Old Bugger goes to George W.'s great-great grandfather, David Davis Walker, who once wrote a letter to the editor of the St. Louis Republic that said:
[i]I consider [Negroes] more of a menace ... than all other evils combined ... For humanity's sake, I am in favor of putting to death all children who come into the world hopeless invalids or badly deformed ... I am in favor of a whipping-post law ... for wife-beaters and all other petty offenders on whom jail sentences are imposed[/i].
In squirming out of combat duty, it turns out W. was merely following a long family tradition, first initiated by D.D. Walker, who Kelley claims got out of the Civil War by paying someone to take his place in the Union army.
But D.D. Walker hardly represents the pinnacle of the family's achievement. His son, George Herbert (Bert) Walker, had his father declared insane late in life to prevent him from giving away too much family money. Bert would later gain some renown during Poppy Bush's tenure in the White House as the family's great investor in Nazi businesses. And until W. came along, Bert Walker was the family's most exalted Maker of Suspiciously Successful Stock Deals. He was also best in the family at buying things (companies, tournaments, land, towns) and naming them after himself.
Most importantly, Bert also began the proud family tradition of Bush/Walker men who were driven to extraordinary accomplishments by their unconcealed contempt for their fathers, who in turn hated their sons.
Then there was Prescott Bush, W.'s grandfather, who took part in the failed theft of Geronimo's skull (he and his creepy Yale friends stole the skull of a ten year-old Apache boy instead) and denounced playwright Edward Albee on the Senate floor without ever reading his work. Prescott appears in the book as the family's great Cringing Ass-Licker; much of the middle chapters are concerned with his tireless efforts to flatter (in succession) Eisenhower, Nixon, Rockefeller and Nixon again.
Prescott, however, was a relative political moderate who supported civil rights and limited forms of socialized medicine and aid to the poor. He is also a vitally important character in understanding our current president as the fruit of the Bush family tree. Prescott represents the moment in the family's evolution before the Genteel Yale Snobs of the Bush family fully merged with the Mean Unscrupulous Moneymaking Bastards of the Walker family.
It is only with Prescott's son, George Herbert Walker Bush, that the two strands of the genetic lineage come together in perfect alignment, hence paving the way for the creation of W.
People who are accustomed to viewing Bush I as the moderate in the family will be shocked at reading Kelley's book. The "bombshell revelations" in the book are likely to be the numerous extramarital affairs Kelly hangs on the neck of Bush I, using language that makes it seem almost inevitable that reporters will now find these mistresses that somehow escaped public detection for all these years. The most obvious lead Kelley offers appears to be an unnamed New York lawyer who claims he was engaged by an Italian woman he calls "Rosemarie," who considered suing Bush I after he broke a promise to leave Barbara for her. I will be shocked if the lawyer and the mistress are not identified by some British tabloid by the end of the baseball season.
But the more damning details about Bush I are the things that he said on the record during his first Senate run – statements that we somehow never heard about when he was running for president. His accomplishments include calling Martin Luther King a "militant," being a member of three all-white clubs in Houston (GHWB: "I always believe people should associate with their friends in things like that"), and deriding the concept of medical care for the aged as "medical air for the caged." It was as useless as putting air-conditioning in a ship hold for caged zoo animals.
And as chairman of the RNC during the Nixon years, Bush I attacked Watergate investigator Carmine Bellino by falsely charging him with wiretapping Nixon in 1960 while working for John F. Kennedy – previewing similar tactics that both he and his son would use as president.
Bush I's fierce campaign to the top of the political totem pole allowed the next generation of Bushes to make their dastardly mark on the world in an atmosphere of relative leisure. This round of Bush children – with names like "Neilsie" and "Georgie" – marked a radical departure from the Bush family tradition. The previous Bush patriarchs, for all their moral flaws, had been men of indomitable will, superior culture, and remarkable ingenuity. With George W., they began an evolutionary march backwards, back toward a more perfect and streamlined ancestor, the Horseshoe Crab Bush, the Coelocanth Bush.
In the book, W. appears as the evolutionary essence of a long and nasty family lineage, boiled down and stripped of civilizing ballast. While popular culture derides Bush II as a bumbling buffoon who has been lucky since birth, in The Family he appears almost beautiful: a pure vision of human ugliness, born to rule an ugly world that deserves him.
The W. sections of the book contain many of the same allegations that have already shadowed his political career: drug and alcohol abuse, adultery, his use of connections to evade military service. The Air National Guard sections includes some new reporting that may move the story forward. Kelley traces Bush's acceptance into the guard, where there was a waiting list 100,000 people long, back through the ranks of the Texas reserves to a phone call from Bush I. But for the most part, these hot-button angles are not documented sufficiently to really hurt Bush.
It is notable that in Kelley's numerous bites at the coke-story apple, she always talks in generalities about drug and alcohol use in the Bush family, as if to convict W. by implication ("We all got hit... Our family suffered terribly," says Bush cousin John.). There is an unmistakable desire to hint at controversy that pervades Kelley's writing, and it shines through particularly in her "revelations" about W.
While this is certainly a flaw in the book, it doesn't detract from the priceless details about the young W. that she does get right. For example: his job as a "pillow-toter" for Republican Senate candidate Edward Gurney, who had a war wound that needed the aid of something soft and portable. Time and again in the book, you witness the future president joyously non-performing in non-jobs in the company of horrified colleagues forced to listen to him ramble on and on about what a great life he has and how he always gets away with everything.
Here's a description of W. when working on the campaign of congressional candidate "Red" Blount in Birmingham (the same time period as when he was supposed to be in the Guard in Texas):
[i]Those who worked with George... recall that he liked to drink beer and Jim Beam whiskey, and to eat fistfuls of peanuts, and Executive burgers, at the Cloverdale grill in Birmingham... [he] tended to show up late every day at work, "around noon," come into the office, prop his cowboy boots on a desk and start bragging about how much he had drunk the night before[/i].
W.'s most distinctive quality in the book is his completely unapologetic attitude about being a child of privilege. He brags to new acquaintances in a political campaign of how his father's name got him out of drunk driving arrests. He tells a Harvard professor openly that he got into the Business School through his dad, happily adding that he got out of Vietnam the same way, as well. Throughout the whole book, W. is mostly bragging or getting drunk, or bragging about getting drunk. It is indeed a great life.
W. does appear more wayward than mean, however, until he gets to Harvard Business School in 1975. That is when he really comes into his own. In one class, he buttonholes a professor for showing "The Grapes of Wrath": "Why are you going show us that commie movie?" Later in that same class, during a discussion on the Great Depression, W. – the same man who has spent his entire life to date boozing and shoving fistfuls of peanuts in his mouth – says: "Look. People are poor because they are lazy." The class freaks out at him, but he holds firm – just as he's holding firm now.
What few people realize about George W. Bush is that it takes balls to be him – it takes balls to go to room full of intellectuals in Cambridge, sit in class without a clue, blast the poor, and call John Steinbeck a commie. The same kind of balls it took to invade Iraq and get the nation into an open-ended war when the whole world told him over and again that it was a terrible idea. His unwavering belief in the righteousness of his idiotic life of privilege is so impressive that you almost come away believing he might be right. The rest of us have doubts; Georgie is always sure, even when he is toting pillows.
As a book, [i]The Family [/i]will merely affirm the worst suspicions of both those who hate George Bush and those who hate the Evil New York Liberal Media. But a few people who aren't too fond of the president might just change their minds. If you are the kind of person who roots for the monster in horror movies, expect to come away from[i] The Family [/i]as a devoted Bush fan.
[b]Source:[/b]
AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
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| ...---... 9/11 Widows: "President Bush thwarted our attempts at every turn" ...---... |
| 09.15.04 (10:39 am) [edit] |
Kristen Breitweiser listens as she and five families of 9/11 victims hold a news conference Tuesday in Washington to endorse Sen. John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race.
[b]The widows known as the "Jersey Girls" changed history by demanding an independent 9/11 investigation. Now they want to change who's president -- though some voted for Bush four years ago.[/b]
Over the last three years, the group of 9/11 widows turned activists dubbed the "Jersey Girls" have become a fixture on the Washington political scene. Some of them are Republicans, others Democrats or independents. But they are all determined to hold official Washington accountable for the attacks that killed their husbands and nearly 3,000 others. They have held news conferences, lobbied members of Congress, pored over documents, and forced the White House to accept an independent commission to investigate the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Along the way, the women have learned about coverups, obfuscation, political cowardice, deceptions and the dangers of eschewing international alliances for a go-it-alone foreign policy.
And their conclusion: For the sake of the country's future, John Kerry must replace George W. Bush.
Gathering at the National Press Club in Washington on Tuesday, the widows announced their endorsement of the Massachusetts Democrat for president, a move made "in good conscience and from our hearts," as former Bush supporter Kristen Breitweiser told the news cameras. "In the three years since 9/11, I could never have imagined I would be here today, disappointed in the person I voted for, for president," she said. Added fellow Jersey Girl Patty Casazza: "It was President Bush who thwarted our attempts at every turn."
The widows said they endorsed Kerry because three years of studying the facts has convinced them he will do a better job than Bush at protecting the nation. "This was not an easy decision to make. We agonized over this," said Monica Gabrielle of West Haven, Conn., an honorary Jersey Girl. "We have always been very careful about not being partisan. We have always attempted to uncover the truth. We have always looked for the greater good." Still, the women said they expect to be trashed as partisan hacks.
"We were joking amongst ourselves yesterday that we should come down here geared up in football pads and helmets, because we were anticipating personal attacks," Breitweiser said. "Some other 9/11 family members have supported President Bush, and I think we have always been respectful of anyone's points of view. And I hope that going forward, the debate and dialogue will be about the issues and it will be respectful and lively. But most important, respectful."
The endorsement was a sword clanging against Bush's political armor. Polls show that voters rate Bush high on his handling of 9/11 and its aftermath, and Republicans have been quick to exploit that approval with television ads and their recent convention, held in Manhattan around the theme of Bush's leadership against terrorism. Meantime, the families of 9/11 victims are split on whom to support for president, with many for Bush.
The Jersey Girls' political foil is Deena Burnett, widow of Thomas Burnett, one of the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. Burnett, who lives in Arkansas, spoke to the Republican National Convention two weeks ago, giving an emotional account of her last conversations with her husband from the plane. "The heroes of 9/11 weren't created that day," Burnett told the convention. "Their actions were the result of virtues practiced over a lifetime." Delegates wiped away tears.
Watching the convention on television, Breitweiser felt not teary-eyed, she said, but frightened. She found the speakers angry and bellicose, and she worried that the Bush administration seemed to revel in war. "I am scared [by] the mentality that my daughter, who is 5 years old, is being handed a tomorrow that will be a war for a lifetime. My husband was killed on 9/11. I do not want to lose my daughter 18 years from now when she's walking or living in a large city, and it's payback for our actions in Iraq," Breitweiser said. Later she told me in an interview that she voted for Bush in 2000 because, well, she's a Republican. "I'm not a Democrat!" she said, when I asked if her endorsement of Kerry meant that she had switched parties.
On Tuesday I was unable to reach Deena Burnett, whose name is not listed in the phone directory, for comment about the Jersey Girls' endorsement of Kerry. But a telephone interview I conducted with her two years ago was revealing for her lack of knowledge about the origins and funding sources of al-Qaida. Burnett is a lead plaintiff in a massive lawsuit against wealthy members of the Saudi royal family and Saudi establishment filed by South Carolina trial lawyer Ron Motley, who is trying to prove that the 9/11 attacks were financed out of the kingdom. Interestingly, many people who share those suspicions about the Saudi role in 9/11 also tend to question the Bush family's close ties to the House of Saud, but not Burnett. When I spoke with her for the profile, I expected to talk with her about the substance of the case. Instead, she directed me back to the lawyers, pleading ignorance of such details as which Saudi prince made which overtures to the Taliban. She clearly wasn't a document hound.
The Jersey Girls are. They have read seemingly every scrap of information about 9/11 and al-Qaida, from news articles to affidavits to footnotes in obscure government reports. And their command of the facts is what has made them so effective. On Sept. 18, 2002, when much of the public was still sympathetic to the Bush administration position that the attacks could not have been foreseen or prevented, Breitweiser gave a statement before the joint House-Senate investigation into intelligence lapses; it may have changed the course of history.
In a concise, straightforward manner, she laid out the facts far more effectively than had any senator or representative on the panel. She asked how, for example, the CIA could fail to locate hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, who had entered the United States despite being on a terrorist watch list, when one was listed in the San Diego phone book and both roomed with an undercover FBI informant. The day after her presentation, the White House -- once firmly against an independent commission -- reversed itself and endorsed the idea. And it was the 9/11 commission that would later find no operational ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, one of the key reasons Bush gave for invading Iraq.
On Tuesday, the widows cited the invasion of Iraq as one of their top reasons for supporting Kerry. "Unfortunately, before the work in Afghanistan was complete ... this administration moved our most precious resources, America's sons and daughters, into Iraq, without the support of our allies. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and that is what we learned from the 9/11 commission's final report," said Lorie Van Auken of East Brunswick, N.J. "Sept. 11 was an enormous intelligence failure, and yet nothing was done to fix our intelligence after 9/11, and that same intelligence apparatus took us into Iraq. So it's doubly frustrating to learn that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11." Van Auken said she is also worried that with military forces stretched thin, her 17-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter could be called up in a draft.
The women said they approached Kerry about the endorsement, not the other way around. Their requests to meet with Bush were rejected. Breitweiser and Gabrielle plan to campaign actively. In Breitweiser's case, it will be difficult, because she hasn't traveled in an airplane since her husband died. "I have serious anxiety about getting on a plane," she said. "But that's how committed I feel."
[b]Sources:[/b]
Salon Magazine, http://www.salon.com/news/fea...
How the widows dug out the truth, http://www.salon.com/news/fea...
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| ...---... Say Goodbye to Reconstruction ...---... |
| 09.15.04 (7:29 am) [edit] |
[b]So the US taxpayer money Dubya embezzled with the collaboration of a Repug-toady Congress to line Cheney's Halliburton's pockets with gold is now going to be diverted onto "security" because the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]has botched Iraq up so badly ... But not to worry: while the corporations & the hyper-rich get their massive tax cuts & boondoggles, the rest of us working people will be asked to shell-out more of our hard-earned dollars for reconstruction (i.e. enriching Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, etc.) ... What a scam, huh!!! ...[/b]
The[i] Associated Press [/i]reports http://www.washingtonpost.com... : "The Bush administration wants Congress' permission to shift nearly $3.5 billion of the $18.4 billion in Iraqi reconstruction aid to security and faster economic growth, documents submitted to lawmakers show. The request, which the administration was expected to formally announce Tuesday, underlines how initial plans for rebuilding the country have had to be reshaped to cope with a violent insurrection that has show little sign of abating."
Concerned taxpayers should note that the funds allotted toward reconstruction by Congress have been left virtually unspent by the Bush administration because of strict rules on awarding contracts. In other words, because it couldn't be turned into a slush fund for Halliburton, the White House chose instead to pay out big chunks of Iraqi's oil money to U.S. companies that have delivered little in terms of reconstruction. And now that same unspent reconstruction money will be put toward the military occupation. To connect the dots, read http://www.alternet.org/waron... Pratap Chatterjee's "Thief of Baghdad."
[b]Sources:[/b]
AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
Out of Control, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ...---... Un-American Bush Regime Increasing Un-democratic Govt. Secrecy ...---... |
| 09.14.04 (2:14 pm) [edit] |
"A general dissolution of the principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy.... While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.... If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security." - Samuel Adams
According to a new report http://www.misleader.org/dail... to be released today by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), the Bush administration is going to extraordinary lengths to increase government secrecy. Misleader.org contends that the report is consistent with earlier signs that the Bush administration is doing everything it can to limit the amount of information the public can get from its government. Last month, a coalition of 30 organizations issued a report saying "Secrecy has increased dramatically in recent years under the policies of the current administration." The report found that the number of documents being classified has jumped 40 percent from 2001. The result is an increasing backlog of requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act.
A must-read is "Bush Administration Documents on Secrecy Policy ... c/o The Federation of American Scientists" on http://www.tblog.com/template...
[b]Sources:[/b]
AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
Bush/Cheney Inc.: A History of Refusing to Release Documents, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Rescuing America From Tyranny, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ...---... Bush Plays The Blame Game: "It's Not Me, Mommy! It's Kerry!" ...---... |
| 09.14.04 (10:58 am) [edit] |
[b]Remember the childhood story about the kid who steals from his Mommy's purse and shamefully puts the blame upon his innocent brother ... That's pathetic A'W'OL Bush's sordid and squalid behaviour all over again!!![/b]
Bush loves to play the blame game-- He actually dishonestly accuses Kerry of wrong-doings that he (A'W'OL) himself commits on everything from service in Vietnam to National Security to the Economy, etc. ... A'W'OL Bush, the party-boy-frat-boy gets out of going to Vietnam via Poppy's influence to join a "Champagne Brigade" Unit from which Dubya goes AWOL anyway ... John F. Kerry volunteers to go to Vietnam (is wounded in action), serves admirably and really defends our nation ... Then Prez-Dubya places our nation's security in greater danger via gross malfeasance on 9/11 and subsequently illegally and immorally invading Iraq (that had nothing to do with 9/11) thus increasing the incidents of terrorism worldwide ... Kerry wouldn't invade a nation based upon lies, deceptions and falsehoods, for he knows first-hand what war really means ...
Furthermore, in Bush's case, [i]his[/i] deficit spending amounts to the re-distribution of working people's money to the top 2% richest Americans and gluttonous corporations ... In Kerry's case, economists agree http://www.washingtonpost.com... , [i]his[/i] (Kerry's) plan is more realistic and that Kerry intends to [i]really[/i] balance the budget ([i]unlike[/i] Bush), but instead of boondoggles for the rich-- Kerry wants to fund health care for our citizens instead of waging war for oil for rich corporate cronies ...
[b]DEFICIT – HIDING THE PRICE TAG:[/b] In his convention speech earlier this month, President Bush claimed Sen. John Kerry has "proposed more than $2 trillion in federal spending http://nygop.org/cgi-data/new... so far, and that's a lot, even for a senator from Massachusetts." What Bush did not say was that he himself was proposing an agenda with an even bigger price tag. As the Washington Post reports, the administration's own cost estimates show the expense of Bush's second term proposals is "likely to be well in excess of $3 trillion over a decade." Specifically, Bush's proposal to make his tax cuts permanent "would reduce government revenue by about $1 trillion" while his Social Security privatization plan "could cost the government $2 trillion." The president has had little to say about the deficit as he barnstorms across the country, prompting critics – including conservative groups – "to say Bush refuses to admit there will not be enough money in government coffers to pay for many of his plans." The silence is an interesting contrast to all the flip-flopping declarations about the deficit the administration has previously issued.
[b]TAXES – BUSH PROPOSALS COULD EQUAL 'WINDFALL' FOR RICH:[/b] President Bush has vowed to make tax reform http://www.usatoday.com/news/... a centerpiece of his second term agenda, but an internal Treasury Department study from late 2002, posted last week on the Washington Post Web site by author Ron Suskind, "warned that any fundamental simplification of the nation's tax system would 'produce windfall winners and losers,' http://www.washingtonpost.com... would likely lower taxes for the rich, and could have devastating political consequences for its champions." Treasury economists identified especially serious drawbacks to reform proposals including a "'flat consumption' tax that shifts the tax burden from savings and investment to wages and spending." Bush has described replacing the income tax with a federal sales tax as "an interesting idea http://www.foxnews.com/story/...,2933,128784,00.html that we ought to explore seriously."
[b]Sources:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
The Choice on the Deficit, http://www.washingtonpost.com...
Dividend Voodoo, Warren Buffett, http://www.commondreams.org/v...
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| ...---... New Polls Give Hope to Both Bush, Kerry ...---... |
| 09.14.04 (9:00 am) [edit] |
The[i] Voice of America [/i]reports http://www.voanews.com/articl...%20Polls%20Give%20Hope%20 To%20Both%20Bush%2C%20Ker ry : President Bush and his Democratic challenger John Kerry can each take hope from new polls released Tuesday, exactly seven weeks before the November 2 U.S. election.
A poll by the[i] Investor's Business Daily [/i]newspaper shows Mr. Kerry pulling even with the president at 47 percent among likely voters. The survey, which has a 3.5 percent margin of error, is the first this month not to show the president in the lead.
However, state-by-state polls conducted by the Gallup organization show Mr. Bush ahead in Missouri, Wisconsin, and Ohio - three of the key "battleground" states that both campaigns have targeted for victory.
Mr. Kerry will speak in both Wisconsin and Ohio Tuesday, while President Bush campaigns in the western states of Colorado and Nevada.
[b]This makes the case for the two principle factors that will swing the outcome of the upcoming presidential election: (1) the presidential debates, which Kerry has agreed to already, but Bush has not, and (2) the turnout of voters on election day, 2nd November ...[/b]
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| ...---... Help! I'm Turning Libertarian! ...---... |
| 09.14.04 (7:30 am) [edit] |
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams
This powerful indictment of Bush's presidency http://www.salon.com/opinion/... by Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute confirms a trend that I have suspected for a while and others have noted as well. In the current political context, and given the huge deficits created by one-party government and the Iraq war, there is less and less distance between libertarians like Bandow and liberals like myself. Obviously, we can and will differ over issues of economic regulation and campaign finance, but those issues, important as they surely are, do not seem to be most important for the country's future at the present moment. The big issues are Iraq, terrorism, foreign policy generally, civil liberties, the health of the economy, and restoring some semblance of sanity to the federal budget. On many of these issues-- including civil liberties, libertarians and liberals can find much common ground.
One of Clinton's most important political innovations was to argue that (and demonstrate how through his policies) Democrats could and should be the party of fiscal discipline. The Democratic Party was and is committed to social programs that will open up opportunities for working class and poor people. But Clinton's point was that one had to pay for these programs. That meant one had to adopt a pay as you go strategy. You had to argue for taxes to pay for new social programs. Without those taxes, you couldn't have the programs.
The President's first term has busted the U.S. budget. His civil liberties policies have been a disaster. His secrecy and mendancity has brought shame on the country. His incompetent handling of the Iraq war has ensnared us in a quagmire that has destroyed our influence abroad and made our foreign policy going forward much more difficult. Under these circumstances, liberals must put first things first. We must restore fiscal discipline, raise taxes, and resolve the Iraq mess in the way least damaging to our long term interests. We must invest in real and practical forms of homeland security and develop new strategies for dealing with terror that do not unduly burden civil liberties. Libertarians can find common cause with most if not all of these goals. Although libertarians may not like raising taxes, many now recognize that this is necessary given the mishandling of the Nation's budget by the present Administration.
Bush's recent rhetoric about an "opportunity society"-- in which the government works to make genuine opportunities for success available for all of its citizens-- is completely consistent with liberal principles. That should not be surprising, given that when Bush seeks to engage in centrist rhetoric he often borrows heavily from successful liberal themes. (See, for example, his lovely Inaugural Address). In a liberal democracy, the government should show equal concern and respect to all of the members of the political community, and it must put in place the conditions that make equal opportunity possible. Given the track record of Bush's first term, however, I doubt that the Republican Party led by George Bush is sincerely interested in the sorts of policies that would make this a reality. In fact, three and a half years of this President have demonstrated that he is not really serious about public policy at all. Rather, he has given away the store to his base-- Christian conservatives, business interests, and wealthy contributors, and done rather little to increase opportunity for the average American, much less for the poor. Bush talks a good game-- and he has great speechwriters-- but when the chips are down he does nothing to show that he is at all serious about the high minded principles that he espouses in his best speeches.
In this political climate, libertarians should find a Kerry Administration much more palatable to their principles, especially if Kerry adopts some version of Clintonism-- fiscal discipline coupled with social libertarianism. Although many on the right simply don't trust Kerry, and have a gag reflex at the thought of voting for a Democrat, they must recognize by now that the Republican candidate, George Bush, has an established track record as president, and he has been a disaster. Kerry with a Republican Congress is much more likely to produce sensible fiscal policies that libertarians could live with than the one party rule we have lived under for the past three and a half years.
If the nation's fiscal health is restored, and if we successfully extricate ourselves from Iraq, the interests of libertarians and liberals may well diverge again. But in the short term-- the next five or so years-- they will have and should have a number of common goals. One of those goals, and perhaps the most important, is getting rid of this mendacious and incompetent Administration.
[b]Source:[/b]
Balkinization, http://balkin.blogspot.com/20...
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| ...---... Bush's Deafening Silence ...---... |
| 09.13.04 (5:21 pm) [edit] |
In 1999, then-Gov. George W. Bush supported the ban on assault weapons, saying "it makes no sense for assault weapons to be around our society http://congress.org/congresso... ." In 2003, then-White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said that Bush not only "supports the reauthorization of the current assault weapons ban" but would "work with Congress" to make sure it remained the law. But during his presidency, "Mr. Bush has never once demanded that his G.O.P. leaders cease playing first responder to the demands of the gun lobby http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... and take the initiative" to extend the assault weapons ban. When the clock strikes midnight tonight, military assault weapons will – once again – be freely available across the country. (For more Bush flip-flops check out President Bush: Flip-Flopper in Chief http://www.americanprogressac... .)
[b]NO SURPRISE TO THE NRA:[/b] In 2000, NRA First Vice President Kayne Robinson said that if George Bush was elected "we'll have...a president where we work out of their office http://www.washingtonpost.com... " and that the NRA had "unbelievably friendly relations" with Bush. The Los Angeles Times describes the expiration of the ban as "a trophy Bush can lay at the NRA's feet as the group readies its presidential endorsement." Pressure from the NRA also caused Sen. Norm Coleman – who supported extending the ban during his 2002 campaign – to switch his position http://idea.startribune.com/s... .
[b]ASSAULT WEAPONS POSE ACUTE THREAT TO LAW ENFORCEMENT:[/b] According to a 2002 report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, assault weapons "pose an enhanced threat to law enforcement, http://www.atf.gov/firearms/y... in part because of their ability to expel projectiles at velocities that are capable of penetrating the type of soft body armor typically worn by the law enforcement officers." Last week, scores of law enforcement personnel from around the country – including police chiefs from Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Seattle http://www.bradycampaign.org/... – assembled at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial "to demand that President Bush and Congress reauthorize the federal assault weapons ban before it expires."
[b]GUN MANUFACTURERS READY:[/b] Gun manufactures have already been "taking orders for semiautomatic rifles and high-capacity ammunition magazines" http://www.washingtonpost.com... that will become legal tonight at midnight. The gun manufacturer Beretta "has been offering customers two free 15-round magazines after Sept. 14 with the purchase of two of its weapons." Current law "restricts the capacity of ammunition magazines to 10 rounds." Armalite Inc. is "allowing customers to order banned assault weapons now and have them shipped once the ban is lifted." Israel Military Industries Ltd. is expected to reintroduce Uzis to the U.S. market. Robert A. Ricker, a former executive director of the American Shooting Sports Council, predicted "an incredible buying frenzy."
[b]BROAD SUPPORT FOR EXTENDING THE BAN:[/b] A recent poll by the Annenberg Public Policy Center showed that 68 percent of Americans support the ban http://www.annenbergpublicpol...:/www.mndaily.com/articles/2004/09/13/1 0138 . Support for the ban extends to all demographics: 61 percent of Republicans, 61 percent of people who live in rural areas and 62 percent of conservatives. Among people who have a gun in their home, a solid majority – 57 percent – support extending the ban.
[b]BOON FOR TERRORISTS:[/b] The impact of the expiration of the assault weapons ban may be broader than you think: newly legal assault weapons could find their way into the hands of al Qaeda terrorists. An al Qaeda training manual recovered in Afghanistan urged terrorists "to come to America and buy assault weapons http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin... ."
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| ...---... Bush Lead Narrows to Less than 1 Point: Americans Like What They're Hearing from Kerry... |
| 09.13.04 (1:06 pm) [edit] |
[b]Which poll does Fox believe?[/b]
The plethora of polls floating around in a presidential election year can be a bit bewildering, so today (Sept. 13) Fox News tried to simplify matters for everybody.
The Fox and Friends co-hosts interviewed Fred Barnes, Fox political analyst, about several polls and asked him which poll he believed -- A Newsweek poll showing Bush up over Kerry, 49 percent to 43 percent, or a John Zogby poll showing Kerry up in the battleground states in the Midwest.
Barnes says, "Zogby's wrong, and I think 49-43 is good." He said states carried by Gore such as Iowa and Wisconsin are now competitive states.
Barnes did not explain why Zogby is wrong. Perhaps he was just following the Fox formula -- when in doubt, give an answer that favors Bush. In this case, that means pick the poll that shows Bush with the bigger lead and just say all the others are wrong.
[b]However ...[/b]
Check out this highly accurate, consistent presidential tracking poll by Rasmussen. Looks like Bush's big 9/11 exploitation bid over the weekend, and the White House bid to discredit CBS backfired rather badly, while John Kerry's outrage at Bush must be resonating big time with the American public. While Kerry gained over a point over the weekend, Bush lost more than a point. The current status: Bush 47.2, Kerry 46.4.
Read "Rasmussen Reports" on http://www.rasmussenreports.c...
Also refer to "Today's Electoral Vote Predictor 2004: Kerry 269 vs. Bush 233 (Map of U.S.A.)" on http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ...---... Explosive Sy Hersh Book: Rumsfeld's Dirty War on Terror ...---... |
| 09.13.04 (9:45 am) [edit] |
In an extract http://www.guardian.co.uk/gua...,13743,1303294,00.html from his new book titled, "Chain of Command," Seymour Hersh reveals that President Bush approved the creation of a secret unit authorized to kill, capture or interrogate suspects using methods considered illegal by international law. Moreover, when evidence of abuse at Guantanamo reached Donald Rumsfeld in autumn of 2002, he did nothing, paving the way for the "export" of those methods to Abu Ghraib.
Also refer to "Bush Team 'Knew of Abuse' at Guantánamo [in 2002]" on http://www.commondreams.org/h...
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| ...---... Kerry Family Values - True Commitment to Social Justice ...---... |
| 09.13.04 (6:44 am) [edit] |
[b]In the insane neo-con, neo-fascist doctrine according to hypocrites A'W'OL Bush and 'Fuck-yourself' Cheney, their so-called "family values" [[i]sic[/i]] translate into their criminal family mantras: [u]All-for-Me-and-Me-for- Me-and-To-Hell-with-You[/ u]!!! You might want to read the eminent historian Barbara W. Tuchman's "The Distant Mirror" (The Calamitous 14th Century - Dark Ages) to find out what such barbarity really means and just how immoral and gluttonous the brutish Bush regime's Age of Corporate Fascism really is ...[/b]
While Kitty Kelley's book describes the "values" of the Bush family, here's a wonderful portrait of the Kerry family. In this interview, John's older sister Peggy describes her 40 years of social activism, including fighting apartheid in South Africa, organizing a grape boycott for the United Farm Workers, working for the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, now working for the UN as the US liason to NGO's, and recently adopting an abandoned Chinese infant. Peggy's anti-war work brought John into Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and the rest is history. Their two other siblings, Cameron and Diana, are also social activists. "I think the Kerry brand of family values is an American brand of family values. ... It's standing up for what is so deeply American which is reaching out and helping other people. It's what America has been known for for so long. It's reaching out and helping people who are less well off." What a wonderful family!
Refer to "Kerry Family Values" on http://www.alternet.org/elect...
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| ...---... Oh, Precious:-- His Four-Letter "Crazies"!!! ...---... |
| 09.12.04 (1:32 pm) [edit] |
[b]Colin Powell in four-letter neo-con 'crazies' row [/b]
A furious row has broken out over claims in a new book by BBC broadcaster James Naughtie that US Secretary of State Colin Powell described neo-conservatives in the Bush administration as 'fucking crazies' during the build-up to war in Iraq.
Powell's extraordinary outburst is alleged to have taken place during a telephone conversation with Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. The two became close friends during the intense negotiations in the summer of 2002 to build an international coalition for intervention via the United Nations. The 'crazies' are said to be Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.
Last week, the offices of Powell and Straw contacted Public Affairs, the US publishers of Naughtie's book, to say they would vigorously deny the claims if publication went ahead. But as no legal action was threatened, the US launch of the book, The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency, will proceed as planned this week.
Naughtie stands by his claims and is said to be privately delighted that Powell and Straw have reacted so violently to the suggestion that the former US general had fallen out with the 'neo-cons'.
Provocatively, the phrase 'fucking crazies' will be quoted on the jacket of the book, according to a source at the publisher. 'We were surprised to receive calls from the offices of Jack Straw and Colin Powell within 24 hours of each other,' the source said.
Naughtie claims that Powell and Straw spoke on an almost daily basis. Powell's concerns were said to have chimed with Straw's and those of Blair himself - that if America acted without UN sanction, allies would be lost.
Cheney and his allies were preparing for a spring war and did not wish to be deflected by the UN inspection process. Powell is thought to have been terrified that the strategy of the 'crazies' would alienate the Blair government, which believed it needed UN backing to win over Parliament and the British public.
John Kampfner, political editor of the New Statesman and author of Blair's Wars, said Naughtie's characterisation of the feverish political atmosphere of the summer of 2002 was entirely accurate. 'The British government saw Powell as the most significant voice of sanity in the US administration. At different times during this very difficult period, the Brits used Powell to get across their point of view to the White House. But, bizarrely, Powell sometimes also used Blair to pass messages to Bush.'
Kampfner's book, which covers the Blair government's military adventures in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, as well as Iraq, reported that in July 2002 Blair sent his foreign policy adviser David Manning on a secret mission to Washington to deliver a letter hinting that, without a second UN resolution, Britain would not be able to join a war in Iraq.
[b]Source:[/b]
Martin Bright, The Observer, United Kingdom, http://observer.guardian.co.u...,6903,1302806,00.html
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| ...---... Failing Miserably to Protect America ...---... |
| 09.12.04 (8:52 am) [edit] |
"Because I do it with one small ship, I am called a terrorist. You do it with a whole fleet and are called an emperor." ~A pirate, from St. Augustine's "City of God"
"War creates peace like hate creates love." ~David L. Wilson
"It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell." ~Gen. William T. Sherman
[b]"We the People" have been ruthlessly manipulated into believing a heinous illusion regarding the "war on terror" and the consequences of falling victim to this dangerous fabrication by the neo-con Bush/Cheney regime are disastrous for our nation ... [/b]
The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta's[/i] illegal and immoral war-turned-bloody-guerril la-quagmire in Iraq was[i] not really [/i]waged to fight any so-called "war on terror" ... In fact, Iraq posed no threat to our nation:-- Iraq wasn't involved in 9/11-- Iraq had no WMDs-- Iraq had no links with Al Qaeda and was not harboring terrorists-- Saddam Hussein & Osama bin Laden were bitter enemies-- Iraq had no intention or capability of harming America ... Instead of pursuing the real terrorists (i.e. Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Saudi Royal Family and the Neo-Con Traitors & Spies in the Pentagon, etc.), the traitorous Bushies let these real perpetrators of 9/11 [i]off-the-hook[/i], in order to wage a Middle East war for oil and domination of the Mideast region ... We must rid ourselves of the mendacious illusions being sold by Karl Rove's neo-fascist 'snake-oil' salesmen/women, and fire the insane neo-hitlerian Bush regime on November 2nd ...
Putting aside the Bush administration's campaign rhetoric on terrorism, a very serious question remains: Are we safer than we were on 9/11? From the failure to capture Osama bin Laden and fully dismantle al Qaeda to major holes in homeland security and a disastrous war in Iraq, the answer is a resounding no.
[b]. The war in Iraq has allowed al Qaeda to regroup and plan new attacks against the U.S.[/b] Rather than finishing off Osama bin Laden when it had the chance and focusing its efforts on dismantling al Qaeda, the Bush administration made a strategic blunder of the first order by shifting focus and resources to invade Iraq – a country that had no connection to the 9/11 attacks. While American troops fight nationalist insurgents in Iraq, al Qaeda is rebuilding and planning its next wave of attacks.
[b]. America remains unprotected from future terrorist attacks.[/b] President Bush promised to protect America after the 9/11 attacks. But three years after 9/11, our cities, ports, borders, and critical infrastructure remain highly vulnerable to attack due to the administration's inaction and underfunding of homeland security measures.
[b]. The U.S. military is stretched dangerously thin.[/b] Extended back-to-back deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq have damaged troop readiness and reenlistment, particularly within the National Guard and reserves which now comprise more than 40 percent of the troops in Iraq. On top of these burdens, the Bush administration has shortchanged our soldiers by resisting providing adequate combat pay, health insurance, education for military families, and disability care for troops overseas and their families at home.
[b]Click here http://www.americanprogress.o...%7bE9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A52 1-5D6FF2E06E03%7d/Failing Grades.pdf for the full report on the Bush administration's failed efforts on terrorism and recommendations for action by the Center for American Progress.[/b]
[b]Courtesy of WinstonSmith http://winstonsmith.tblog.com... [/b]
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| ...---... Bloodbath:-- U.S. Troop & Iraqi Civilian Casualty Counts Rise ...---... |
| 09.12.04 (8:50 am) [edit] |
"What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness god has given us in this world... " - Robert E. Lee
[b]The traitorous Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] has squandered the precious lives of over 1,000 U.S. Soldiers and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians http://apnews.myway.com/artic... in an illegal and immoral war in Iraq based upon heinous lies, deceptions and falsehoods ... Who has "benefitted"??? You'll find the u$g$l$y$ answer in the bulging pockets of the gluttonous corporate top-dogs & rapacious fat-cats at Halliburton, Carlyle Group, Bechtel, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc. ... For the sake of our nation's soul, "We the People" must reject the insane neo-con, neo-fascist Bush Death Cult used to terrorize our own citizens and the world community in order to reap ungodly war-profits ...[/b]
The [i]Washington Post [/i]reports http://www.washingtonpost.com... : "With the latest spike in violence in Baghdad, more U.S. troops have died since the turnover of power to an interim Iraqi government at the end of June than were killed during the U.S.-led invasion of the country in the spring of 2003.
"A total of 148 U.S. military personnel have been killed since the partial transfer of sovereignty on June 28, compared with 138 who died in March and April of 2003, Pentagon figures show."
[b]As the official death toll in Iraq climbs above the 1,005 mark, attacks against the US are accelerating ... [/b]Thanks to the despotic Bush/Cheney neo-con machine and their vile, traitorous pay-masters: Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc. ... Oh, yes and let's not forget the Saudi Royal Family and the real Prez of the USA: Israeli Likud Neo-Fascist Ariel Sharon!!! ...
[b]U.S. Conceding Rebels Control Regions of Iraq [Bush/Cheney really botched-it-up badly ... But then liars rarely succeed in the longer-term ...][/b]
WASHINGTON - As American military deaths in Iraq operations surpassed the 1,000 mark, top Pentagon officials said Tuesday that insurgents controlled important parts of central Iraq and that it was unclear when American and Iraqi forces would be able to secure those areas.
As of late Tuesday night, the Pentagon's accounting showed that 998 service members and three Defense Department civilians had been killed in Iraq operations.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference that the American strategy in retaking rebel-held strongholds hinged on training and equipping Iraqi forces to take the lead.
Mr. Rumsfeld said Iraqi officials understood they must regain control of the insurgent safe havens. "They get it, and will find a way over time to deal with it," he said.
But General Myers said the Iraqi forces would probably not be ready to confront insurgents in those areas until the end of this year.
Their comments, which came after a two-day spike in violence in Iraq led to a surge in American military deaths, represented an acknowledgment that the Americans had failed to end an increasingly sophisticated insurgency in important Sunni-dominated areas and in certain Shiite enclaves. Fighting raged on Tuesday in Sadr City, in Baghdad, as Shiite militiamen loyal to Moktada al-Sadr ended a self-declared cease-fire. [Page A14.]
The officials' assessment also underscored the difficulty of pacifying Iraq in time for elections scheduled for January. The cities of greatest rebel control are Ramadi, Falluja, Baquba and Samarra, in the so-called Sunni triangle, west and north of Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein remains popular and many forces loyal to him have gathered strength.
There is increasing concern in the administration over plans for the election, with some officials saying that if significant parts of the Sunni areas cannot be secured by January, it may be impossible to hold a nationwide balloting that would be seen as legitimate. Putting off the elections, though, would infuriate Iraq's Shiite majority. The elections are for an assembly that is to write a new constitution next year. Mr. Rumsfeld warned that the violence would intensify as elections approached.
Mr. Rumsfeld said that Prime Minister Ayad Allawi recognized that his government could not continue to allow rebel control in crucial areas of the country, but that it would take time for him to determine how to proceed.
"The prime minister and his team fully understand that it is important that there not be areas in that country that are controlled by terrorists," he said, adding that Dr. Allawi would deal with the problem by "negotiation and discussion" in some cases and by force in others.
Other administration officials, amplifying the secretary's comments, said the administration had decided to let Dr. Allawi try to persuade rebel leaders to join the process of reconstructing Iraq, or suffer the consequences if they did not.
"Allawi's strategy is to try to find people on the sidelines and wean the moderates away, to give them courage and a hope of reward for themselves," said an administration official. "He's telling them: 'I'm giving you an opportunity to meet your local concerns. You're going to be my guy, and together we'll try to isolate the extremists.' "
Administration officials say no decision has been made yet for American forces to attack those strongholds. The preference is for Iraqi forces to do the job, as they were said to have been poised to do last month in Najaf, the Shiite holy city.
But the record of the Iraqi security forces has not been inspiring, although some Iraqi forces fought well in Najaf, American officials said. While 95,000 soldiers have been trained and equipped up to American commanders' satisfaction, General Myers said, they will not be ready until the end of the year to join American forces in any assault against insurgent strongholds and then keep the peace afterward.
"While U.S. forces or coalition forces can do just about anything we want to do, it makes a lot more sense that it be a sustained operation, one that can be sustained by Iraqi security forces," General Myers said. "By December, we're going to have a substantial number of Iraqi security forces equipped, trained and led to conduct the kind of operations I was talking about."
A senior American official said force would be tried by the Iraqi government only after a couple of months' discussions with rebels.
"Force is the ultimate sanction, but let's exhaust the other ones first," he added.
A two-month hiatus before major force is applied to rebel areas would also mean a delay until after the American presidential election, but senior officials insist there is no domestic political calculus in the decision to wait - only a conviction that time is needed for negotiation and for Iraqi forces to gain strength.
"This is ultimately about building an Iraqi government which works for all of Iraq," said the official. "To the degree that we can wait a couple months and let Iraqi politics work, so much the better."
In describing the Iraqi forces, one American general in Iraq said in an e-mail message that their "capabilities are still uneven, but they're improving as we arm and equip them better, improve their infrastructure, give them additional training, and help them weed out the weak leaders." Mr. Rumsfeld added that Iraqis had recently conducted effective counterterrorism operations.
To buy time, General Myers said, Gen. George Casey, the top American commander in Iraq, is working with the Iraqi government to develop a strategy to retake the cities. General Myers said that strategy included trying to "isolate certain communities," hampering the insurgents' ability to rearm and resupply, and curtailing attacks against American forces. He said the strategy would also try "to set the conditions for the successful use of force later," military wording for preparing the battlefield by bombing safe houses and weapons caches, and encouraging residents to provide fresh intelligence on the location of insurgents.
Over the weekend, Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the land commander in Iraq, told The Associated Press that an American assault is likely in the next four months. "I do have about four months where I want to get to local control," General Metz said. "And then I've got the rest of January to help the Iraqis to put the mechanisms in place."
Maj. Gen. John R. Batiste, the commander of the Army's First Infantry Division, whose area north of Baghdad includes Tikrit and Samarra, disputed reports that the United States had given up in Samarra.
"Samarra is a city where Iraqis are taking charge to throw out anti-Iraqi forces," he said in an e-mail message on Tuesday. "No one has ceded the city to insurgents and there is no cordon. What we have in Samarra is the good people of Iraq, led by far-sighted provincial and city leadership, senior sheiks, and clerics, standing up to the enemy."
Residents, however, say insurgents effectively control Samarra.
General Batiste and other commanders gave an upbeat assessment, noting that "the messages at Friday Prayer are becoming more and more moderate" and that American forces "keep continuous pressure on the enemy" while they help Iraqis with reconstruction. In an unusual step for a Pentagon that tends to avoid citing body counts as a measure of success, Mr. Rumsfeld said American and allied forces had probably killed 1,500 to 2,500 insurgents last month.
But other American officials are more pessimistic about the prospects for regaining control of those areas. One noted, for example, that attacks on American forces rose to 2,700 in August, from 700 in March.
General Myers conceded that American forces faced a tough, adaptive foe. "The enemy is becoming more sophisticated in his efforts to destabilize the country," he said. - http://www.truthout.org/docs_...
Also refer to "[b]Bush's Bloodbath: Number of Iraqis Killed May Top 30,000 - and Climbing Rapidly[/b]":-- - [i]Excerpt[/i] - ...
[b]AP:[/b] "[While] no official, reliable figures exist for [Iraq], private estimates range from 10,000 to 30,000 killed since the United States invaded in March 2003. The violent deaths recorded in the leather ledger at the Sheik Omar Clinic come from only one of Iraq's 18 provinces and do not cover people who died in such flashpoint cities as Najaf, Karbala, Fallujah, Tikrit and Ramadi. Iraqi dead include not only insurgents, police and soldiers but also civilian men, women and children caught in crossfire, blown apart by explosives or shot by mistake - both by fellow Iraqis or by American soldiers and their multinational allies. And they include the victims of crime that has surged in the instability that followed the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime." - http://apnews.myway.com/artic...
[b]Courtesy of WinstonSmith http://winstonsmith.tblog.com... [/b]
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| ...---... The Terror Playbook of Karl Rove ...---... |
| 09.11.04 (2:48 pm) [edit] |
"The worst crimes were dared by a few, willed by more and tolerated by all." ~Tacitus
"Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism." ~George Washington
"I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war...suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own." ~Phillip Caputo
[b]In his convention acceptance speech, President George W. Bush used a variation of the word "terror" a mere sixteen times. few days later, during a day's campaign appearances in Missouri, the Bush references to terror totalled forty-three, while during his infamous a-vote-for-Kerry-is-a-vot e-for-a-terrorist-attack dialog in Iowa, Vice-President Cheney went called up the terror image twenty-three times, expanded one day later in a New Hampshire appearance to twenty-six.[/b]
After the criminal attacks of 9/11, fear and terror have been trump cards in the speech-making lexicon of the Bush Administration. It's as if the message is, "Be afraid. Be very afraid. But don't worry. We're here to protect you." The other guys, as Cheney let slip in Iowa, will bring on another attack. Not only must citizens fear the terrorists, they must (equally, perhaps) fear the Democrats -- especially John Kerry and John Edwards, candidates with a magnetic attraction to terrorism's evil nature.
Even Senator John McCain, embarrassed but doggedly pimping for the Bush-Cheney re-election, claims that terrorism poses the greatest threat to the nation's existence since . . . well, since ever. McCain's pony show is especially troubling, because the senator knows personally how vicious and cruel these no-holds-barred Bush campaigns can be. McCain and Kerry share a sorry characteristic: they both served with distinction during wartime, McCain especially so; but their years in the senate seem to have drained them of the courage to blow the whistle on wrongdoing--as Kerry did when he returned from Vietnam and reported on the horrors of war to those back home.
Behind this Bush-Cheney Reign of Terror is the Frankenstein genius of Karl Rove. As Wayne Slater and James C. Moore point out in their book and film "Bush's Brain," 'twas Rove who "created" George W. Bush the Politician, just as Mary Shelley's good doctor created his creature, proving there is no "self-made" man currently occupying the White House--unless it is the genius Karl Rove himself. Rove, perceptive student of history, knows about the earlier French "reign of terror" and its patrie en danger condition, precursor to our own cancerous Patriot Act. During the last election and the administration of George W. Bush, Rove's signature is on everything, but his fingerprints are nowhere to be found.
Each time John Kerry and John Edwards are put on the defensive by some surprise, such as the recent Swift Boat attack ads, Rove can be assumed to be somewhere behind the curtain pulling the strings. His proof of success, the envy of many ethically-challenged politicians and hack political operatives, is in the pudding he concocted by turning a black-sheep of the Bush family into a presidential swan. And yet one can not help but wonder if there is a limit to Rove's "How To Succeed" formula. Is it possible to go too far? Are the American people really as stupid and pliable as Rove's cynicism knows them to be? Will Karl Rove's swan take a swan dive in the end?
A signal part of the Rove-Terror strategy has been to raise the possibility of an imminent terrorist attack: on a holiday, at the Super Bowl, during the Democratic or the Republican Convention, just prior to the November election, or, as Cheney so clearly implied: if the American voters elect the Kerry-Edwards ticket.
Although this hysteria-producing scenario has little or no basis in historical fact, it has enough plausibility to give less-thoughtful voters pause. "Oh, oh. I'd better vote for Bush and Cheney . . . Just in case."
Of course if Bush and Cheney are re-elected and another terrorist attack occurs on U.S. soil, the blame can always be dumped on the Clintons, easy targets for vilification because of their high visibility and the hatred they engender in right-wing circles of compassionate conspiracy.
Another fear-of-terrorism hypothesis has been the prospect that a terrorist attack on the day of the November election causing the election to be postponed. A neat scenario if George W. Bush a far behind in the polls. One wonders if Rove has a plan, and the cheek, to pull it off. Although the cancellation of the election seems doubtful, one might imagine a situation where the impending threat of terrorism coupled with a move to red-orange alert could cancel one or more presidential debates. President Bush seems interested in limiting the number of debates to two, but with sufficient outcry from the public he will likely flip-flop and accept a third debate--unless the terrorism level and national safety require otherwise.
There seems little doubt the current father of his nation of ten-year-olds considers re-election more important than trading words with an elite Brahman from (wink-wink) Massachusetts.
As I write this, the Swift Boat assault on John Kerry's reputation seems to have backfired as more evidence emerges of George W. Bush and his less-than-stellar performance in the National Guard. Still, Rove must have counted on having to deal with the problem, even though the mainstream media has been overly-timid about asking the right questions, such as: "Why would a young man trained as a jet pilot give up his opportunity to fly simply because he missed a physical examination?" "Why could the examination not have been re-scheduled?" "If George W. Bush was in Alabama, why couldn't he (a) take the physical there, or (b) catch a military or commercial flight back to Texas and complete the required examination?" The "evidence" may not be in the missing documents but in a generous application of good old American "common sense."
Terrorism, real terrorism, is a serious problem. It may be much more a criminal problem than one our military can resolve.
There are no organized armies of terrorist hordes waiting to set sail in an armada to invade East Hampton, Arlington or the Mendocino coast. Only the most thoughtless pessimist would argue that terrorists, even if armed with "suitcase" weapons of mass destruction, could "bring down" the United States of America. It is not about to happen, whomever sits in the Oval Office or stalks the halls of the Pentagon.
England was not destroyed by Hitler's wrath. Germany survived the horrific attacks on Dresden and Hamburg. The destruction of Leningrad did not wipe out the Soviet Union or the spirit of the Russian people. Japan, the one nation subjected to nuclear holocaust, survives today. Even Chechnya has not been brought to its knees, despite the murderous efforts of dictators from Stalin to Putin.
Terrorists and terrorism are not about to wipe out the United States. Let's get real. If Democrats are willing to "think outside the box" and stop quaking at every mention of the name "Karl Rove," the tables could be turned, the ethical vacuum known as Bush's Brain may be vanquished and America's new long self-imposed nightmare of fear and terror may end. Then Mr. Rove can finally join the private sector and amass the financial fortune he knows he so truly deserves.
[b]Doug Giebel is a writer and analyst who lives in Big Sandy, Montana. He will participate in a panel on October 23 human rights conference to be held on at Rutgers University (Camden Campus). He welcomes correspondence at dougcatz@ttc-cmc.net [/b] - http://www.counterpunch.com/g...
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| ...---... Recognizing Who Served & Who Did Not Serve!!! ...---... |
| 09.11.04 (11:41 am) [edit] |
[b]This could be the last election where military service in Vietnam has any political currency. But just for the record, it's worth noting who really served among the heavyweights in each of the major political parties.[/b]
There are some surprises here. Did you know John Kerry received three purple hearts, a silver star and a bronze star for his bravery and valor in Vietnam? Not kidding. Did you know that Dubya went AWOL from a cushy 'Champagne Brigade' Unit set-up for rich brats to avoid any danger whatsoever? Not kidding.
But here's the list. Be sure to check out the bottom where the people who spend their time jabbering about military service (the TV pundits) have their military credentials exposed.
[b]Democrats[/b]
. Richard Gephardt: Air National Guard, 1965-71.
. David Bonior: Staff Sgt., Air Force 1968-72.
. Tom Daschle: 1st Lt., Air Force SAC 1969-72.
. Al Gore: enlisted Aug. 1969; sent to Vietnam Jan. 1971 as an army journalist in 20th Engineer Brigade.
. Bob Kerrey: Lt. j.g. Navy 1966-69; Medal of Honor, Vietnam.
. Daniel Inouye: Army 1943-'47; Medal of Honor, WWII.
. John Kerry: Lt., Navy 1966-70; Silver Star, Bronze Star with Combat V Purple Hearts.
. John Edwards: did not serve.
. Charles Rangel: Staff Sgt., Army 1948-52; Bronze Star, Korea.
. Max Cleland: Captain, Army 1965-68; Silver Star & Bronze Star, Vietnam.
. Ted Kennedy: Army, 1951-1953.
. Tom Harkin: Lt., Navy, 1962-67; Naval Reserve, 1968-74.
. Jack Reed: Army Ranger, 1971-1979; Captain, Army Reserve 1979-91.
. Fritz Hollings: Army officer in WWII, receiving the Bronze Star and seven campaign ribbons.
. Leonard Boswell: Lt. Col., Army 1956-76; Vietnam, DFCs, Bronze Stars, and Soldier's Medal.
. Pete Peterson: Air Force Captain, POW. Purple Heart, Silver Star and Legion of Merit.
. Mike Thompson: Staff sergeant, 173rd Airborne, Purple Heart.
. Bill McBride: Candidate for Fla. Governor. Marine in Vietnam; Bronze Star with Combat V.
. Gray Davis: Army Captain in Vietnam, Bronze Star.
. Pete Stark: Air Force 1955-57
. Chuck Robb: Vietnam
. Howell Heflin: Silver Star
. George McGovern: Silver Star & DFC during WWII.
. Bill Clinton: Did not serve. Student deferments. Entered draft but received 311.
. Jimmy Carter: Seven years in the Navy.
. Walter Mondale: Army 1951-1953
. John Glenn: WWII and Korea; six DFCs and Air Medal with 18 Clusters.
. Tom Lantos: Served in Hungarian underground in WWII. Saved by Raoul Wallenberg.
. Wesley Clark: U.S. Army, 1966-2000, West Point, Vietnam, Purple Heart, Silver Star. Retired 4-star general.
. John Dingell: WWII vet
. John Conyers: Army 1950-57, Korea
[b]Republicans[/b]
. Dennis Hastert: did not serve.
. Tom Delay: did not serve.
. House Whiip Roy Blunt: did not serve.
. Bill Frist: did not serve.
. Rudy Giuliani: did not serve.
. George Pataki: did not serve.
. Mitch McConnell: did not serve.
. Rick Santorum: did not serve.
. Trent Lott: did not serve.
. Dick Cheney: did not serve. Several deferments, the last by marriage.
. John Ashcroft: did not serve. Seven deferments to teach business.
. Jeb Bush: did not serve.
. Karl Rove: did not serve.
. Saxby Chambliss: did not serve. "Bad knee." The man who attacked Max Cleland's patriotism.
. Paul Wolfowitz: did not serve.
. Vin Weber: did not serve.
. Richard Perle: did not serve.
. Douglas Feith: did not serve.
. Eliot Abrams: did not serve.
. Richard Shelby: did not serve.
. Jon Kyl: did not serve.
. Tim Hutchison: did not serve.
. Christopher Cox: did not serve.
. Newt Gingrich: did not serve.
. Don Rumsfeld: served in Navy (1954-57) as aviator and flight instructor.
. George W. Bush: six-year Nat'l Guard commitment (in four & was AWOL at that).
. Ronald Reagan: due to poor eyesight, served in a non-combat role making movies.
. Gerald Ford: Navy, WWII
. Phil Gramm: did not serve.
. John McCain: Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross.
. Bob Dole: an honorable veteran.
. Chuck Hagel: two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star, Vietnam.
. Duke Cunningham: nominated for Medal of Honor, Navy Cross, Silver Stars, Air Medals, Purple Hearts.
. Jeff Sessions: Army Reserves, 1973-1986
. JC Watts: did not serve.
. Lindsey Graham: National Guard lawyer.
. G.H.W. Bush: Pilot in WWII. Shot down by the Japanese.
. Tom Ridge: Bronze Star for Valor in Vietnam.
. Antonin Scalia: did not serve.
. Clarence Thomas: did not serve
[b]Pundits & Preachers [/b]
. Sean Hannity: did not serve.
. Rush Limbaugh: did not serve (4-F with a 'pilonidal cyst.')
. Bill O'Reilly: did not serve.
. Michael Savage: did not serve.
. George Will: did not serve.
. Chris Matthews: did not serve.
. Paul Gigot: did not serve.
. Bill Bennett: did not serve.
. Pat Buchanan: did not serve.
. Bill Kristol: did not serve.
. Kenneth Starr: did not serve.
. Michael Medved: did not serve.
[b]Source:[/b]
AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
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| ...---... Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire ...---... |
| 09.11.04 (6:31 am) [edit] |
[b]A new documentary "Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire" examines how the Bush administration used Sept. 11 to transform American foreign policy and enter a phase of so-called preemptive warfare while rolling back civil liberties and social programs at home[/b].
The film is produced by the Media Education Foundation and features former government officials combined with many of the leading scholars and thinkers of our time including Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, Chalmers Johnson, Daniel Ellsberg, Tariq Ali and more. The film is narrated by Julian Bond.
[b]. Sut Jhally[/b], director of the new documentary "Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of American Empire." He is a professor at the University of Massachusetts and the founder and executive director of the Media Education Foundation http://www.mediaed.org/ .
[b]. Hijacking Catastrophe[/b], excerpt of documentary.
[b]We hear http://www.democracynow.org/a... an excerpt of a new documentary by the Media Education Foundation, "Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire" which examines how the Bush administration used Sept. 11 to transform American foreign policy and enter a phase of so-called preemptive warfare while rolling back civil liberties and social programs at home. [includes rush transcript ... see below or listen to interview http://www.democracynow.org/a... ][/b]
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to start, though, with the man who produced this film at Media Education Foundation, his name is Sut Jhally director of Hijacking Catastrophe, a professor at the University of Massachusetts. Welcome to Democracy Now!
SUT JHALLY: Good morning, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: It's interesting to talk to you, Sut, from Buffalo, a city that has suffered from the aftermath of 9/11, to talk you to, who have come to New York, and now are in our Firehouse Studios, just blocks from Ground Zero. Can you introduce Hijacking Catastrophe, why you made it?
SUT JHALLY: When we sat down to think about this film about a year ago, myself and the co-director and producer of this, Jeremy Earp, we wanted to do two things: We wanted to explain clearly what exactly the war in Iraq was about. Given that the lies of the Bush administration are totally unraveling, the lies about the weapons of mass destruction, the lies about Saddam Hussein being connected to Osama Bin Laden. We wanted to get at the real reasons for the war. To do that, we have to trace back the influence of a small right wing cabal within this Bush administration. And the plans that they had laid out for the invasion of Iraq actually ten years ago. On one hand, we wanted to give Americans a clear explanation of why exactly are we in this mess in Iraq and the incredible costs that are being paid in terms of dead and maimed American soldiers, tens of thousands of dead Iraqis and billions of dollars flowing out of this country. What are the reasons for that. That was one reason. The other thing we wanted to do, we tried to anticipate a year ago, what exactly the Republican strategy would be to try and sell this crazy war. And in fact, after looking at the convention last week, we actually hit it almost dead on. We knew that they would be evoking the memory of 9/11. We knew they would be trying to scare people so that they would not think clearly about what was going to be going on. And that they would be presenting themselves as strong leaders and also denigrating the Democrats as, as Arnold Schwarzenegger said, as “girlie men.” So we also wanted to look at the selling of this. The film does both. The film looks at why we're there and also how this crazy agenda has been sold to the American people. What's really interesting is when Paul Wolfowitz first came up with this in 1992, Paul Wolfowitz is now Deputy to Rumsfeld in the Department of Defense. When he first wrote, in 1992, the tail end of the first Bush administration, he wrote something called “The Defense Planning Guidance.” In this was the first laying out of a post-Cold War era strategy for America, in which they would become, in which America would become the sole superpower for essentially forever. When this was first announced in 1992, everyone thought was crazy. People within the administration thought he was crazy. Joseph Biden was the leading Democrat at that time. He could barely speak when he heard this. Our European allies were up in arms. Now what is really interesting is: What was crazy in 1992, by 2002 had become official government policy. And what we look at is how 9/11 was used to sell that, how the fear and anxiety engendered by 9/11 was used by this administration to push through this agenda that they could not have gotten any other way.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Sut Jhally, who is the director of this new film, Hijacking Catastrophe. He is the Executive Director of the Media Education Foundation. Let's take a look and a listen to a clip of Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and The Selling of American Empire. In this clip, we begin with the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Jody Williams.
JODY WILLIAMS: I understand that they want the American public to believe that the invasion of Iraq was the response to September 11. I think it is a lie. I believe that it is part of a neoconservative agenda to assert that American hegemony is untouchable, and September 11 gave them the opportunity to put in play plans that they had been considering since the first Bush administration.
NARRATOR: In all of its previous incarnations and long before 9/11 and the current war on terror, the Wolfowitz doctrine had identified regime change in Iraq as a crucial first step towards global domination by force. In a widely circulated letter to President Bill Clinton in 1998, the members of the Project for the New American Century challenged the President to act forcefully and militarily to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Two years later, George W. Bush would hand-pick many of these same neoconservatives for key foreign policy posts in the Pentagon and State Department. Once installed in government positions, as recent interviews with a number of former members of the Bush administration have revealed, the group maintained its long-standing focus on Iraq, a focus that intensified after the attacks of September 11.
MARK DANNER: In the meetings of the inner sanctum of the Bush administration, the attack on Iraq was brought out from almost the first days. Even though there was no evidence whatever that the Iraqis had been involved in this.
RICHARD CLARKE: They dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, I want you to find whether Iraq did this. George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.
PAUL O’NEILL: From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person, and that he needed to go.
NARRATOR: Just five hours after American airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon, and without any evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks of 9/11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was already ordering his aides to draw up plans for striking Iraq. The notes quote Rumsfeld as saying he wanted: “Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H.,” meaning Saddam Hussein. “Go massive,” Rumsfeld continued in the notes. “Sweep it all up. Things related, and not.”
ROBERT JENSEN: The problem for the Bush administration is that plans that had already existed for regime change in Iraq had to be justified. They could not just go in without public support. The public support was creating by connecting Saddam Hussein to those fears of terrorism. The fear generated by 9/11, the fear of terrorist networks has to be transferred to Iraq, that is, the American people have to learn to be as afraid of Saddam Hussein as they are of Osama Bin Laden.
NARRATOR: Soon after September 11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld set up a small intelligence office in the Pentagon, the Office of Special Plans to create the rationales for the already planned attack on Iraq. To convince people that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, and that he was linked to Al Qaeda and 9/11. Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski worked in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia Office. She witnessed how the Office of Special Plans issued talking points about Iraq for senior government officials allegedly based on intelligence.
KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: The information there drawn from fact. You can find bits and pieces of fact throughout, but framed, articulated, crafted to convince someone of what? Well, of things that weren't true. Things that were not true. 9/11, Al Qaeda related to Saddam Hussein, possibly some involvement there.
GEORGE W. BUSH: The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We have removed an ally of Al Qaeda.
KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: The very things that a year later, President Bush himself denies, and feigns his surprise: “I don't know why everybody thinks that.”
GEORGE W. BUSH: We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September 11.
KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: I worked in a place where they concentrated on preparing this story line and selling it to everybody they could possibly sell it to.
ROBERT JENSEN: It wasn't the failure of intelligence, it was the manipulation of intelligence to achieve a political goal. They were disciplined. They stayed on message, they marshaled all of their forces in this relentless public relations campaign to convince the American people that there was a threat from Iraq.
NEWS ANNOUNCER: Day four of the Bush team’s full court press giving speech after speech after speech and issuing reports.
DONALD RUMSFELD: The United States knows that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. Any country on the face of the earth with an active intelligence program knows that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
COLIN POWELL: There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.
GEORGE W. BUSH: The choice is his – and if he does not disarm, the United States of America will lead a coalition and disarm him in the name of peace.
KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: And the President’s mouth, the Vice President’s mouth these same things that were given to us to put into our superiors, the senior civilian leadership’s mouths – he said things that were us to put to our theories now. These were not based on intelligence that we saw and everyone saw. They were based on a very selective reading of the intelligence and a creative packaging that you could put through these two big points that the President and Vice President and the whole neoconservative community used to justify this pre-emptive war on Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Karen Kwiatkowski, former Pentagon employee, part of the documentary, Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and The Selling of American Empire. It is produced by Sut Jhally the Media Education Foundation in Western Massachusetts. Sut Jhally is in our New York studio. I'm here in Buffalo. Sut Jhally, can you talk about the power of these films at this time? You have got Hijacking Catastrophe, your film. There’s Outfoxed, the film by Robert Greenwald. Of course, Michael Moore's, Fahrenheit 9/11, the significance of them coming now?
SUT JHALLY: I think Robert Greenwald's Outfoxed, and Michael Moore's, Fahrenheit 9/11, showed the tremendous need and desire there is for people for new information at this time. I think the effects of these films we’ll only find out once the election has been held. The key to that is these films are – the key to the films is not only that they're produced, but they're watched, that they're used, they're used by activists and they engage with what's going on at that time. So distribution, I think is the most important aspect of this. I have been very encouraged by how widespread these films have been. Our film is opening tonight at Cinema Village in New York. It's opening in theaters around the country as well, but only a small number of them. I really support people to support independent film. We are also distributing this film through our website. We want this film to be available now, and so in fact these films have also indicated a new way to distribute which is not just theatrical, we can distribute in DVD at the same time. The website is http://hijackingcatastrop he.o... We want to encourage people to get it now and show it to their friends. People that you wouldn't normally talk to about those things. Take it to your cable access station and show it.
AMY GOODMAN: Briefly, the purpose of the Media Education Foundation?
SUT JHALLY: We make films and videos to do with the media’s effect on society. What we really try to do is take the latest cutting edge academic research and translate it into an accessible form, so you don’t have to be an expert to understand it and to make knowledge in the University really matter in the world out there. I can't think of a more important time for that to happen than in the next eight weeks coming up to this election. Hijacking Catastrophe is an attempt to take what we know, the latest cutting edge research that we know, the truth that we know, to put it in an accessible form so that ordinary people can engage with the most important issues of day.
AMY GOODMAN: And again your website.
SUT JHALLY: Our website is http://hijackingcatastrop he.o... We are committed to getting this out in a major way. We have priced it very affordably. People can get it for $20. We hope that people will take it and use it as much as possible between now and November 2nd.
AMY GOODMAN: And it's opening in tonight in New York at Cinema Village and can open anywhere in the country, just ask your movie theater. Sut Jhally, thank you for being with us. Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Founder and Executive Director of the Media Education Foundation.
[b]To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here https://store.democracynow.org/?pid=10&show=2004-09- 10 for our new online ordering or call 1 (800) 881-2359.[/b]
[b]Source:[/b]
Democracy Now, http://www.democracynow.org/a...
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| ...---... A Picture Of A Bush Intimidator Is Worth A Thousand Words ...---... |
| 09.10.04 (2:05 pm) [edit] |
A member of the audience pulls a demonstrator's hair as he forces her out of an auditorium where President Bush was addressing a crowd of supporters at Byers Choice in Colmar, Pa. Thursday Sept. 9, 2004. - http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...
Also refer to "The Intimidators" on http://www.sfbg.com/38/50/new...
[b]Categories:[b] Dictatorship, Neo-Con, Neo-Fascism
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| ...---... The Press Bites the Red Herring Hook-Line-and-Sinker ...---... |
| 09.10.04 (11:03 am) [edit] |
[b]The veracity of a memo relating to Bush's National Guard records is in question. The proof? [/b]Teary claims http://abcnews.go.com/section... from the family of the officer who "wrote" the memo and the testimony of "experts" who point to certain anachronistic qualities within it.
Well, if I had a dollar for every widow and son who said that their late husband/father "wouldn't have done that" and "it just wasn't like him," I'd have a huge DVD collection of every movie Preston Sturges ever made. Which I don't.
As for the memo's qualities which "experts" claim weren't available at the time, bloggers are working overtime to refute each and every claim as they arise (see Kos http://www.dailykos.com/story... and to a lesser degree Atrios http://atrios.blogspot.com/20... , who writes that although he won't "spend the day arguing about fonts and typewriters, because the whole thing is so goddamn stupid... what kind of "experts" in this area are unable to do a google search in 5 seconds and discover that IBM had been marketing a basic typewriter with proportional spacing [one feature that a 1972 memo "couldn't have had"] since 1941?")
But the important words here are "so goddamn stupid."
This one document notwithstanding, there are still the matter of several missing documents of reprimand http://www.alternet.org/elect... , missing dates, the lie that he missed his medical exam because he already knew he would be transferred to Alabama, the admission by a Lt. Governor that he jumped the list to get in to the National Guard based on preferential treatment and a host of other inconsistencies and verifiable instances of special treatment. There're even several unclaimed rewards http://www.awolbush.com/ -- the latest of which is offered by Texans for Truth -- for anyone who can prove that Bush fulfilled his service.
Forgery or no, the bigger picture -- again -- is being lost.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Evan, AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
AWOL Fraud - at ABC, CNN, and FOX!, http://community.democrats.co...
[b]Bob Fertik blogs[/b], "While the media is breathlessly trying to prove CBS broadcast fraudulent AWOL memos, three other networks committed fraud this week - yet no one but Salon's Eric Boehlert noticed. All 3 networks gave time to retired Lt. Col. John 'Bill' Calhoun, who claims he saw Bush performing drills in Alabama in the SUMMER of 1972. There's only one problem with Calhoun's story - Bush's OWN records show Bush didn't get credit for any time until October. We don't need typewriter experts to prove that October is not in the SUMMER - making Calhoun's statements an obvious fraud.! Of course it's been 32 years and people's memories fade, so on 2-24-04, Democrats.com submitted a FOIA request for Lt. Calhoun's records, to see if his drill dates overlapped with Bush's (http://democrats.com/display....). However, in February the White House ordered the Pentagon to reject ALL FOIA requests - so the truth remains a mystery."
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| ...---... End of Term Report Card: Bush Administration on National Security ...---... |
| 09.10.04 (7:50 am) [edit] |
[b]Failing Grades: America's Security Three Years After 9/11[/b]
[b]"We the People" must send the corrupt neo-con Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] packing (with incompetent & bungling Dubya back to Crawford, TX where he apparently belongs ... although a prison-cell would be more appropriate) on the 2nd November 2004, for the despotic Bush regime has miserably failed our nation, our citizens and the entire world community ...[/b]
[b][u]Download the entire PDF report[/u]:[/b] http://www.americanprogress.o...{E9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A521- 5D6FF2E06E03}/FailingGrad es.pdf
Three years after the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration is failing the test of protecting the American people from the terrorist threat at home and abroad.
Although some progress has been made on limited fronts, the record is clear: the administration's disastrous war of choice in Iraq; its decision to ignore and shortchange real terrorist threats; its half-hearted attempts to secure nuclear, biological and chemical weapons; and its weakening of our military have left the American people facing greater risks than we did on September 12, 2001.
A comprehensive examination of the record of the Bush administration yields a sobering conclusion: far from improving our security, the Bush administration has managed to squander a historic opportunity to bring together the citizens of the United States and the people of the world in a unified fight against terror.
Instead, the administration has emboldened the world's most dangerous regimes and escalated the potential of nuclear conflict. The president's policies have alienated governments and peoples around the globe, and have helped terrorist groups in their recruiting efforts. The administration has failed to set priorities or follow up on crucial early successes.
Any attempt to grade the Bush administration record in the war on terrorism must begin in Iraq – now nothing short of a catastrophic diversion that has weakened our security. The war has claimed nearly 1,000 American lives, left close to 7,000 wounded, and stretched our military to the breaking point. The occupation continues to drain billions of taxpayer dollars every month – and there is no end in sight. The administration's assertion that Iraq is the "central front" in the war on terror has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the Bush administration's willful manipulation of the facts to lead the country into war has done enormous damage to the presidency and eroded our international credibility.
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, PDF Report, http://www.americanprogress.o...{E9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A521- 5D6FF2E06E03}/FailingGrad es.pdf
[b]Courtesy of WinstonSmith http://winstonsmith.tblog.com... [/b]
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| ...---... The Truth About Job Numbers ...---... |
| 09.09.04 (4:35 pm) [edit] |
[b]Washington Post:[/b] "Since 2000, the Census Bureau tells us, median family income has declined by $1,535, to $43,318. The poverty rolls have swelled by 4.3 million newly poor people. The number of Americans with no health insurance has risen to 45 million. If those mournful numbers may not seem like opportunity run amok, though, that's because our definition of 'opportunity' is too constricted. Think of the word, as the president must, as meaning the chance to do well, or poorly, or to crash and burn altogether. Think of it as a synonym for 'risk,' and the president's entire program falls into place. Once you comprehend that the president is peddling increased risk rather than opportunity as the term is commonly understood, Bushonomics becomes crystal clear." - http://www.washingtonpost.com...
[b]"We the People" are facing gloomy economic times ahead with rising inflation; higher energy costs; increasing unemployment, poverty, homelessness; a lack of health care for tens of millions of our citizens; and the highest deficits/debts in our nation's history, the interest payments of which will hit working people hard (the rich are sheltered because the Bushies awarded themselves massive immoral tax cuts); etc.-- This catastrophic fiscal policy failure is due in large measure to the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta's [/i]reckless economic rape of America on behalf of gluttonous corporate robber-barons, wealthy plutocrats, and foreign interests ... It is time to restore sanity and remove these traitors and thieves in the despotic Bush regime from office ...[/b]
The news last week that unemployment was down to 5.4 percent sounded good. But, unfortunately, there wasn't a corresponding rise in payroll jobs. So how good, really, is the news? Robert Reich says that to understand what the unemployment numbers really mean, you need to know what questions surveyers are asking—and how they're asking them. Here, unemployment polling 101.
[b]Robert B. Reich is the Maurice B. Hexter Professor of Social and Economic Policy at Brandeis University, and was the secretary of labor under former President Bill Clinton[/b]
Last Friday’s household survey showed the unemployment rate dipping to 5.4 percent in August, which isn’t bad by historic standards. But last Friday’s payroll survey showed that employers created only 144,000 payroll jobs in August, which is pretty awful given that the economy needs at least 150,000 just to keep up with new workers coming into the labor market. So the obvious question: Do we have anything to celebrate this post Labor-Day week?
Well, let’s take a closer look. The more upbeat household survey is compiled every month by a team of surveyers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics who visit a random sample of 60,000 homes around country, and ask: "Are you working?" If the answer they get is "no," the next question is "Are you looking for work?" Only if the answer to that second question is "yes"—I’m looking for work—is the person counted as "unemployed." This means that everyone who’d like to work but has given up looking because they’ve tried and can’t find any work, is not included as being among the unemployed. There’s the additional problem that some people who aren’t working but are embarrassed to admit it will say they are.
The payroll survey, by contrast, asks a much larger and different sample—400,000 employers, who employ about a third of the entire workforce—how many employees they’ve added over past month. No guesswork there. Just look at the payrolls. There’s only one rub: The payroll survey doesn’t include everyone who’s become self-employed.
Now, this would be a problem if self-employment were a real alternative. But that’s not what the evidence shows. A new research paper from the San Francisco Federal Reserve finds that the number "self-employed" rises during weak economies and falls when people can find payroll jobs. In other words, being "self-employed" doesn’t necessarily mean you’re making enough money to live on. All it might mean is you can’t find a payroll job and you’re calling yourself "self-employed." No big surprise there.
Bottom line: Employers are still reluctant to hire. And it’s not hard to figure out why. Demand for their goods and services remains soft—because consumers, who are also workers, don’t have enough money in their pockets or confidence in their jobs and paychecks to flood back into the malls.
[b]Sources:[/b]
1. The Truth About Job Numbers, http://www.tompaine.com/artic...
2. REAL US Unemployment Rate Closer to 6.4% than the 5.4% Claimed by Bush, http://www.baltimoresun.com/n...,1,7750575.story?coll=bal-opinion-he adlines
[b]Baltimore Sun:[/b] "Yes, the latest employment data, released Friday, signal improvement. August's unemployment rate was 5.4 percent, compared with 6.1 percent a year earlier. Trouble is, the U.S. economy right now still has a million fewer people working than at the start of the recession in March 2001. And millions of discouraged workers have been leaving the job market or have become mired in underemployment. As a result, the labor force participation rate this summer fell to the lowest point in almost 13 years. Economists at the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented think tank, figure that translates to more than two million missing workers. These are workers so discouraged that they've given up looking for work, and thus they're not factored into the official unemployment rate calculation. If they were -- and there's a good argument for that -- the true unemployment rate would be more like 6.4 percent."
3. Bush's Game of Risk, Harold Meyerson, http://www.washingtonpost.com...
[b]Washington Post:[/b] I've been confused for some time about the president's economic vision, as, I suspect, have many of you. After months of close textual analysis, though, I think I've narrowed down the source of that confusion. It's the word "opportunity," or, more precisely, what the president means when he says it.
"This changed world can be a time of great opportunity for all Americans to earn a better living, support your family and have a rewarding career," Bush said in his acceptance speech last week in New York. Perhaps it can, but on initial inspection, it sure isn't yet.
Since 2000, the Census Bureau tells us, median family income has declined by $1,535, to $43,318. The poverty rolls have swelled by 4.3 million newly poor people. The number of Americans with no health insurance has risen to 45 million.
If those mournful numbers may not seem like opportunity run amok, though, that's because our definition of "opportunity" is too constricted.
Think of the word, as the president must, as meaning the chance to do well, or poorly, or to crash and burn altogether. Think of it as a synonym for "risk," and the president's entire program falls into place.
Once you comprehend that the president is peddling increased risk rather than opportunity as the term is commonly understood, Bushonomics becomes crystal clear. It explains the administration's assault on governmental programs offering security. Viewed in this light, the administration's decision to raise seniors' monthly Medicare premiums by 17.5 percent the day after the president's acceptance speech isn't hypocritical in the slightest. It's just a way to prod seniors to stop lolling around and to take more responsibility for their care and feeding.
At a time when private employers everywhere are cutting back on health insurance and shunning defined-benefit pensions, government can move in to fill the gap or leave people to their own resources. Bush's response is to let people fend for themselves, whether or not they have the capacity to do so. "More people will own their health plans," he told his convention, "and have the confidence of owning a piece of their retirement."
But not many more. Bush is proposing a tax credit of no more than $1,000 to individuals and $3,000 to families to purchase health insurance, though the health care premiums for a family of four come to roughly $9,000 a year. A huge aggregate increase in opportunity, if you define opportunity as risk.
So, too, with a privatization of Social Security, which is a generational transfer of income from workers to retirees. If workers divert, say, one-sixth of their Social Security savings into private accounts, then retirees' incomes will be diminished, unless the government cares for deficit spending to the tune of, say, a half-trillion dollars. And those private accounts themselves could very well go south: It's been known to happen; it's called a slump, a recession, the occasional breakdown of a sector of the U.S. economy. Call it opportunity, properly defined.
It's more than a matter of lexicographical curiosity to understand how the president came to conflate risk with opportunity. Certainly he's no stranger to risk. As a young man, he went into the oil business, where dry holes outnumber gushers seven days a week. Then came politics, which is also among the chancier ventures a fellow could pursue.
But if there's one enduring motif in the life of George W. Bush, it is that he's always been sheltered from the consequences of risk -- that is, of failure. Exposed to the draft, he had business and political associates of his father get him a slot in a National Guard unit far from Vietnam. As an oil bidness entrepreneur, he would have gone belly-up on several occasions but for the intervention of more such associates, for whom the notion of helping out the vice president's boy had a certain je ne sais quoi. And when he was a presidential candidate, even a defeat at the polls could be reversed by the Republican majority on the Supreme Court.
No wonder risk and opportunity are all jumbled up in the mind of George W. Bush. Privilege has trumped risk at every turn in his life.
But it's not Bush alone who suffers from this confusion. Republican members of Congress, who also preach the gospel of opportunity, nonetheless cling to their defined-benefit pensions rather than replace them with a congressional 401(k) plan. I don't know how many, if any, have renounced their congressional health insurance for a private account they themselves own and shell out for, but I suspect it would be a small caucus indeed.
[b]The dirty little secret of Bushonomics is that risk -- excuse me, opportunity -- is for suckers. Like the American people.[/b]
[b]Courtesy of WinstonSmith http://winstonsmith.tblog.com... [/b]
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| ...---... Cheney Spits Toads ...---... |
| 09.09.04 (11:34 am) [edit] |
[b]Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, became a columnist on [i]The New York Times [/i]Op-Ed page in 1995 after having served as a correspondent in the paper's Washington bureau since 1986. She has covered four presidential campaigns and served as White House correspondent. She also wrote a column, "On Washington," for [i]The New York Times Magazine[/i].
Ms. Dowd joined [i]The New York Times [/i]as a metropolitan reporter in 1983. She began her career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for [i]The Washington Star[/i], where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter and feature writer. When the [i]Star[/i] closed in 1981, she went to[i] Time [/i]magazine.
Born in Washington D.C., Ms. Dowd received a B.A. degree in English literature from Catholic University (Washington, D.C.) in 1973.[/b]
[u][b]Cheney Spits Toads[/b][/u]
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have always used the president's father as a reverse lodestar. In 1992, the senior Mr. Bush wooed the voters with "Message: I care.'' So this week, Mr. Cheney wooed the voters with, Message: You die.
The terrible beauty of its simplicity grows on you. It is a sign of the dark, macho, paranoid vice president's restraint that he didn't really take it to its emotionally satisfying conclusion: Message: Vote for us or we'll kill you.
Without Zell Miller around to out-crazy him, and unplugged after a convention that tried to "humanize'' him with grandchildren, horses and wifely anecdotes about his inability to dance the twist, Mr. Cheney is back as Terrifier in Chief.
He finally simply spit out what the Bush team has been more subtly trying to convey for months: A vote for John Kerry is a vote for the terrorists.
"Because if we make the wrong choice,'' Mr. Cheney said in Des Moines in that calm baritone, "then the danger is that we'll get hit again. That we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind-set if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we're not really at war.''
These guys figure, hey, these scare tactics worked in building support for the Iraq war, maybe they can work in tearing down support for John Kerry. They linked Saddam with terrorism and cowed the Democrats (including Mr. Kerry, who has never been able to make the case against the Bush administration's trompe l'oeil casus belli) and fooled the country into going along with their trumped-up war. So why not link Mr. Kerry with terrorism and cow the voters into sticking with the White House they've got?
It's like that fairy tale where vipers and toads jump out of the mouth of the accursed mean little girl when she tries to speak. Every time Mr. Cheney opens his mouth, vermin leap out.
The vice president and president did not even mention Osama at the convention because of the inconvenient fact that the fiend is still out there, plotting. Yet they denigrate Mr. Kerry as too weak to battle Osama, and treat him as a greater threat.
Mr. Cheney implies that John Kerry couldn't protect us from an attack like 9/11, blithely ignoring the fact that he and President Bush didn't protect us from the real 9/11. Think of what brass-knuckled Republicans could have made of a 9/11 tape of an uncertain Democratic president giving a shaky statement that looked like a hostage tape and flying randomly from air base to air base, as the veep ordered that planes be shot down.
Mr. Cheney warns against falling back "into the pre-9/11 mind-set,'' when, in fact, the Bush team's pre-9/11 mind-set was all about being stuck in the cold war and reviving "Star Wars" - which doesn't work and is useless against terrorist tactics. The Bush crowd played down terrorism because Bill Clinton and Sandy Berger had told their successors that Osama was a priority, and the Bushies scorned all things Clinton. The president shrugged off intelligence briefings with such headlines as "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States'' because there was brush to be cleared and unaffordable tax-cutting to be done.
After the blue-ribbon graybeards declared the Bush administration's pumped-up W.M.D. claims and Saddam-9/11 links bogus, the White House went into a defensive crouch - especially the man in the undisclosed bunker, who had veered wildly between overly pessimistic predictions of Saddam's nukes and overly optimistic predictions of grateful Iraqis with flowers and chocolates.
For a time, it seemed that Americans were realizing they'd been flimflammed by the Bushies. But at the convention, the swaggering Bush juggernaut brazenly went back to boasting about its pre-emption doctrine, tracing imaginary connections between 9/11 and Saddam, and calling all our foes terrorists.
Why should the same group that managed to paint a flextime guardsman as a heroic commander - and a war hero as a war criminal - bother rebutting or engaging with critics?
As the deaths of American men and women fighting in Iraq topped 1,000, and with insurgents controlling parts of central Iraq, the White House trotted out the same old discredited line, assuming it can wear - and scare - everyone down by November.
[b]Source:[/b]
Maureen Dowd, N.Y. Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
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| ...---... George A'W'OL Bush, This is Your Life ...---... |
| 09.09.04 (9:43 am) [edit] |
[b]Will George A'W'OL Bush come clean about his youthful profligate ways???[/b]
George W. Bush's past is finally catching up with him. Out of the morass of delays, partial truths, preemptive attacks, and doubletalk come weighty allegations from an indefatigable news service, an important public figure, advocacy organizations and a hack author – all of whom refuse to call off the search. The allegations vary in their authenticity and the depth of their political motivations, but they all add up to Bush taking heat for a past he has never had to publicly account for.
On Sept. 5, in the midst of Labor Day weekend, The Associated Press report http://story.news.yahoo.com/n... quietly filed an article alleging that: "Documents that should have been written to explain gaps in President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service are missing from the military records released about his service in 1972 and 1973.... For example, Air National Guard regulations at the time required commanders to write an investigative report for the Air Force when Bush missed his annual medical exam in 1972."
Though Bush claims to have skipped the exam due to the fact that he already knew he'd be in Alabama, the record actually exposes that rationale as a lie: "Bush was required to take the physical by the end of July 1972, more than a month before he won final approval to train in Alabama."
In response to an AP Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the government claimed that it had released all records that "it can find." AP then issued this challenge to the government: "The AP identified five categories of records that should have been generated after Bush skipped his pilot's physical and missed five months of training."
And lo, three days later, still under pressure from that pesky lawsuit, new records on Bush's service http://www.nytimes.com/aponli... were suddenly "found": "The Pentagon and Bush's campaign have claimed for months that all records detailing his fighter pilot career have been made public, but defense officials said they found two dozen new records detailing his training and flight logs...."
White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan spun the newly released records with unprecended gall, saying "These documents confirm that the president served honorably in the National Guard." But the AP concluded that the records confirm just the opposite:
"The records show his last flight was in April 1972, which is consistent with pay records indicating Bush had a large lapse of duty between April and October of that year."
The Boston Globe, http://www.boston.com/news/po...%20/bush_fell_short_on_du ty_at_guard/ after its own examination of available records, was even less equivocal: "Bush fell well short of meeting his military obligation." The Globe quoted a furious Army Colonel who's studied Bush's records and concluded, "He broke his contract with the United States government – without any adverse consequences.... It cost the government a million dollars to train him to fly. So he should have been held to an even higher standard."
Another interesting development has even greater symbolic bearing on the current presidential race, focusing as it does on who will make the better commander-in-chief in the prevention of, and responsiveness to, a surprise attack: "A six-month historical record of his 147th Fighter Interceptor Group, also turned over to the AP on Tuesday, shows some of the training Bush missed with his colleagues during that time... It showed the unit joined a '24-hour active alert mission to safeguard against surprise attack' in the southern United States beginning on Oct. 6, 1972, a mission for which Bush was not present, according to his pay records."
Surprise attack; Bush nowhere to be found. Sound familiar?
Wednesday's AP report ends by reiterating the challenge that even the latest Bush documents "do not include any from five categories of documents Bush's commanders had been required to keep in response to the gaps in Bush's training in 1972 and 1973."
Bob Mintz, a lieutenant colonel in the Alabama Air National Guard who served at the Montgomery base that George Bush was supposed to attend in 1972 went on the record on Wednesday to say that he did not see George Bush in service once. “"I never met the man and I'm sorry I didn't because he's somebody important." Mintz underlined his certainty that Bush did not attend, saying, “It would have been impossible to be unseen in a unit of that size,” referring to the 50 to 60 total pilots who served on the base.
In concert with Mintz’s statements, a group known as Texans for Truth has purchased a rasher of advertising time slots in Ohio, Michigan, Oregon, and Arizona for ads that ask for a full account of Bush’s attendance records for the National Guard, quoting numerous officers and soldiers who question Bush’s attendance.
If all this isn't too damning for the president's aides to spin their way out of, there's Bush's freewheeling Alabama days. The nephew of the Senatorial candidate Bush went to work for, Murph Archibald, worked side by side with Bush until Archibald replaced him; the reason was poor performance. According to Archibald there was also a whole lotta drinkin' – and very little working – goin' on. Speaking to NPR's All Things Considered http://www.juancole.com/2004_... 56024 in March of this year, Archibald commented, "in a campaign full of dedicated workers, Mr. Bush was not one of them.... Ordinarily, George would come in around noon; he would ordinarily leave around 5:30 or 6:00 in the evening."
Why so late? In a word: liquor. "I thought it was really unusual that someone in their mid-20s would initiate conversations, particularly in the context of something as serious as a U.S. senatorial campaign, by talking about their drinking the night before. I thought it unusual and, frankly, inappropriate."
And lest anyone portray this as an isolated incident, All Things Considered summed up Archibald's attitude toward Bush's drunken tales: "the frequency with which Mr. Bush discussed the subject was off-putting to him."
And here's a claim that ought to ruffle the feathers of the law-and-order crowd: "He told us [campaign staffers] whenever he was stopped [for erratic driving while at Yale], as soon as the law enforcement found out that he was the grandson of Prescott Bush, they would let him go. And he would always laugh about that."
Another allegation that's made its way into the mix – despite the general groundlessness of the claim – is that Bush snorted coke more recently than anyone thought. Kitty Kelley’s soon-to-be-released biography of the Bush dynasty, “The Family,” http://www.alternet.org/elect...http://www.amazon.com/exec/ob...%3Dnosim/oliverwillisl-20 /002-8159131-3900860 quotes Bush's former sister-in-law Sharon: "Bush did coke at Camp David when his father was President, and not just once either."
Kelley apparently also manages to get in touch with several former classmates for her book, one of who laments, "He went out of his way to act crude. It's amazing someone you held in such low esteem later became president."
During the previous campaign, when Bush was asked if he'd ever done drugs his response was: "I've told the American people that years ago I made some mistakes."
Few of these allegations are new, and many of them Bush succeeded in fending off during his 2000 campaign – but he only had to deal with them one by one. Now these allegations are in the public debate at the same time, and are greater than the sum of their parts: they add up to major scandal about Bush's reckless youth and dishonorable military service in Vietnam. It remains to be seen if George W. Bush can defend and discredit these allegations in the way that John Kerry and his campaign have undermined the Swift Boaters' claims a few weeks ago.
[b]Source:[/b]
Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet. - http://www.alternet.org
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| ...---... Cheney Stoops to a New Low ...---... |
| 09.09.04 (6:37 am) [edit] |
[b]"Vote for Us or Die" is the current neo-con, neo-nazi mantra spewed by the corrupt neo-fascist Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]...[/b] Refer to "Vote for Us or Die" on http://www.tblog.com/template...
Dick Cheney, who had his conscience surgically removed three decades ago, has stooped to a new low.
He said that if Bush doesn't win in November, "then the danger is we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating."
This scare tactic, that only Bush can protect the United States, is amazing for its audacity.
First of all, for months now, the Bush Administration has been warning us that we might be attacked before the election. So then it would be whose fault?
And Bush and Cheney have not done everything to protect us, as they've left our ports and our nuclear and chemical plants open to attack, and they have not safeguarded the enriched uranium and the suitcase nuclear bombs of the former Soviet Union.
Then there's the Iraq War, which has made us a lot less safe, engendering hatred of America throughout the Arab and Muslim world.
And let's not forget, Bush and Cheney themselves were the ones in power when the United States was attacked in a devastating way on 9/11.
Are they ever going to be held responsible for that?
Cheney himself was supposed to be in charge of national preparedness, as of May 2001. And he didn't do squat.
This from the 9/11 Commission Report: "President Bush announced that Vice President Cheney would himself lead an effort looking at preparations for managing a possible attack by weapons of mass destruction and at more general problems of national preparedness." It took Cheney a few months simply to get an admiral to head the effort, the report said, concluding: "The Vice President's task force was just getting under way when the 9/11 attack occurred."
What right does Cheney have to criticize anyone about leaving the United States vulnerable to a devastating attack?
[b]Source:[/b]
Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive, http://www.progressive.org/we...
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| ...---... CURRENT ELECTORAL VOTE PREDICTOR 2004 (8th September 2004 - Map) ...---... |
| 09.08.04 (6:12 pm) [edit] |
[b]Electoral Vote Predictor 2004: Kerry 264 - Bush 222[/b]
[b]Sept. 8 New polls:[/b] AR FL IA MI MN MO NV NH NM OH OR PA TN WA WV WI
[b]Legend:[/b]
Blue - Strong Kerry (99)
Light Blue - Weak Kerry (112)
Blue Outline - Barely Kerry (53)
White - Exactly tied (52)
Red Outline - Barely Bush (29)
Light Red - Weak Bush (31)
Red - Strong Bush (162)
[b]Needed to win: 270 [/b]
[u][b]News from the Votemaster[/b][/u]
The biweekly Zogby poll http://online.wsj.com/public/... of 16 battleground states taken Aug 30 to Sept 3 has now been released. It was taken during the RNC and many people were polled before Bush's acceptance speech, so it does not full reflect the post convention bounce (but see below). Neverthless, it is more recent than any other round of battleground state polls. Briefly summarized, it shows that Bush is gaining, but still has a ways to go. He now leads in four states compared to only two states in the Aug. 17-21 poll.
In three of these states, West Virginia, Tennessee, and all-important Ohio, his lead is outside the margin of error. In Ohio it is a whopping 11%. On the other hand, Kerry's lead in Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington is also outside the margin of error. In Florida, Nevada, and Missouri, Kerry leads slightly, but the map shows them as tied because the numbers round to the same integer.
I have gotten e-mail from some people who don't trust Zogby, either because he uses a new technology (normalized Internet polling) or because they don't like his results or because he is personally a Democrat. The technology is indeed new, but telephone polling wasn't trusted when it first came out (sometimes with justification as in the 1936 Literary Digest poll), but it eventually became the norm. Like all pollsters, Zogby normalizes his results to make sure he has correctly weighted for first-time male voters, single white women 25-35, African-American grandmothers, etc. It was for precisely this failure to correct the raw data that Rasmussen chastised Time and Newsweek Monday.
In 2000, Zogby was the most accurate pollster and the only one to predict Gore would win the popular vote. But the thing that makes me most confident of Zogby is that he is the Wall St Journal's house pollster. The WSJ is not some wacko leftist organization whose goal is to make Kerry look good. They are paying good money for Zogby's services (traditional polls cost around $15,000 per state but obviously the WSJ buys so many polls that they get a very large discount) and are staking their reputation as a newspaper on his results. To me, having a conservative Republican newspaper like the WSJ choose Zogby over all his competitors speaks volumes about his accuracy and professionalism.
In the 3-day rolling average poll, Rasmussen now has Kerry and Bush exactly tied at 47.3% each nationally, with Kerry 1.2% ahead in the battleground states. If we compare this to the 3-day rolling average poll published Aug. 30, Bush is at exactly the same level he was then and Kerry is 0.9% higher. From these data, it appears that the postconvention bounce is already played out. In short, all the hand-wringing and cheering based on the Time and Newsweek polls was a bit premature. If you are a Democrat, you can stop crying in your beer; if you are a Republican, carefully try to pour the champagne back into the bottle. It is still very close.
[b]Clarification:[/b] Yesterday http://www.electoral-vote.com... I said no Republican has ever been elected to the Senate from Louisiana. What I should have said is that no Republican has ever been elected to the Senate by the people of Louisiana. During reconstruction, when the governments of the southern states were in turmoil and carpetbaggers swarmed over the land, three Republicans, John Harris, Joseph West, and William Kellogg, were appointed by the state legislature. However, no Republican has ever been elected to the Senate from Louisiana since direct election of senators began after the XVIIth amendment was ratified in 1913. My apologies for the confusion caused to students of Louisiana history. - http://www.electoral-vote.com...
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| ...---... New Poll Shows War Hero Kerry Gains vs. A'W'OL Bush Drops With A 'Thud' ...---... |
| 09.08.04 (2:11 pm) [edit] |
[b]New ICR poll, conducted September 1st-5th ...[/b]
With Nader, among 'likely voters': Bush:46, Kerry: 46, Nader: 4.
Without Nader, among 'likely voters': Bush 48, Kerry 47.
Without Nader, among 'registered voters': Bush 46, Kerry 47.
[b]Source:[/b] http://www.talkingpointsmemo....
[b]Which is why ...
DEBATES WILL DECIDE THIS ELECTION[/b]
There were some real nasty Republicans around here last week, and few New Yorkers were sorry to see them go. But then the Democrats in Boston weren't exactly begging us to follow the better angels of our nature. So here is some unsolicited advice for voters: Forget about this presidential election for the next four weeks.
The conventions are over and, as things stand now, the next major wave of political events will begin with the first televised debate between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry on Sept. 30 in Coral Gables, Fla. If history is a guide, the election will be settled that night. Or, it will be settled in the second and third debates, on Oct. 8 in St. Louis and Oct. 13 in Tempe, Ariz.
Those are dates and places chosen by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, which has produced all 12 presidential debates since 1988. The White House has not agreed to the schedule yet, but I assume that is a formality. After all, if you recall, George W. Bush won (sort of) the presidency in those 2000 debates. There likely would not have been so close an election if Bush had not prevailed in the three 2000 debates. Like John F. Kennedy in 1960, Bush came to the debates as the likable lightweight against the know-it-all vice president.
Bush won, as Kennedy did, by showing up and not fainting. He had to prove he had a pulse and was a plausible alternative to Vice President Gore. He did that and ... well, you do the numbers.
With the candidates in some kind of tie right now, we can expect nonstop campaigning and maligning in the so-called "battleground" states, which include Florida and Missouri. And, presuming Kerry now intends to hit back instead of leading with a pawing left jab, this fight will be bloody and dirty, demeaning to all concerned. Children under a certain age should not be allowed to watch television this month. Adults should avoid it if they can.
The real September contest will be about looking at the record. You can bet that the incumbent Republican and his down-and-dirty team are going to research every one of Kerry's thousands of votes in the Senate, distorting a few and ignoring any that make the man from Massachusetts look good.
All those votes day after day, year after year, many forgotten, many forgettable, are the reason that no sitting senator since Kennedy has won the White House. There is just too much in a senator's background, some of which made sense at the time, that can be shoved back down his throat. In 2000, Bush was better protected because he was only a governor, the chief executive of a state that had stripped the executive of real power. There's not much record of what Texas governors do because they don't have much to do, which can be a blessing if you want to be president.
But that has all changed now. President Bush has a record, and I assume Kerry's negative researchers are all over that. The devil is in the details. Democrats usually see governance as making speeches and passing laws. Republicans are better executives, and their governance is better traced through executive orders and federal regulations. Bush has issued 150 or so executive orders and, with almost no scrutiny, presided over the enforcement, modification or elimination of thousands of federal regulations -- word changes that allow coal miners to lop off the tops of Appalachian mountains or that channel federal aid to favored religious groups.
The debates should be good. Kerry was called the "second-best" debater he handled by the distinguished and revered Yale debate coach, Rollin Osterweis. (The best, said Osterweis, was William F. Buckley.) To tamp down expectations about his own performance, Kerry is saying that Bush has never lost a debate. That's not quite true, but the president is a canny fellow and has a secret weapon, a sense of humor.
So I look forward to the winner-take-all debates. I also look forward to ignoring a lot of what goes on before Sept. 30. - http://www.uexpress.com/richa...
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| ...---... Rummy Targets Iran ...---... |
| 09.08.04 (2:06 pm) [edit] |
"There is no question that the force is stretched too thin" - US Military Experts, http://www.thetruthseeker.co....
[b]Our US Military is over-stretched as it [i]is[/i] http://www.thetruthseeker.co.... ... The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] has badly bungled its' illegal and immoral bloody-guerrilla quagmire in Iraq (and Afghanistan is a mess [i]too[/i]) ... Now these insane neo-con neo-fascists are beating their ugly war drums for an unnecessary incursion into Iran, a nation nearly 4 times larger in land mass [i]and[/i] 3 times the population of Iraq??? ... "We the People" must surely rid ourselves of the despotic neo-hitlerian Bush regime [i]ASAP[/i] who are reckless, ruthless, incompetent and dangerously corrupt ... [/b]
[b]Vital Statistics:[/b]
[b]Iraq -[/b]
Area in square miles: 168,753 (437,072 sq km)
Population (2003 est.): 24,683,313
[b]Iran -[/b]
Area in square miles: 636,293 (1,648,000 sq km)
Population (2003 est.): 68,278,826
[b]Source:[/b] [i]Time Almanac [/i]2004
There are now 1,001 American reasons why Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a mistake, but Don Rumsfeld is talking about Iran. And Bill Luti, the former Gingrich aide who runs the Near East and South Asia (NESA) office at the Pentagon and who is reportedly a key cog in the machine now targeted by the FBI’s counterintelligence unit, has five or six other countries in mind. Re-elect Bush, anyone?
Meeting reporters and editors of the Moonie-led [i]Washington Times[/i] http://www.washingtontimes.co... (yes, I subscribe to that) Rumsfeld said:
... "Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld charged yesterday that Iran is fueling the deadly insurgency in Iraq with money and fighters.
But … Mr. Rumsfeld acknowledged that the United States has limited options because other nations are "not willing" to join in pressuring Iran, which has shown behavior that Mr. Rumsfeld said is "not part of the civilized world."
Asked for details yesterday on Iranian meddling, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "They have put people in there. They have put money in there.
"By 'they,' I'm not going to say which element of the government or whether it's even known to the government. But money has come in from Iran. People have come in from Iran. And it's a very difficult thing to stop," he said. "Iran is a country that is not part of the civilized world in terms of its behavior."
Asked whether Iran is funding Sheik al-Sadr, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "There's a lot of speculation to that effect."" ...
At the very least Rumsfeld is trying to blame Iran for the catastrophically bad news out of Iraq. Problem is, the strongest resistance to the U.S. occupation comes from Sunni-led groups who don’t especially like Iran. But with Americans dying at ever-faster rates, he has to blame someone.
Now Rummy is right that America has few options. Of course, we had few options in Iraq in 2003, and Bush chose the very worst of those. The growing split between Europe and the United States over Iran’s nuclear ambitions is a sign that the White House is once again thinking about choosing the wrong one. And while Iran certainly is meddling in Iraq, the ayatollah most closely linked to Sadr broke with him recently, and in fact Iran could totally destroy the U.S. position in Iraq if it wanted to; so far, at least, it is acting with great restraint. How long that restraint will last if Rumsfeld keeps muttering about the mullahs is open to question. And there is this question: Is Rumsfeld trying to set the stage for an Israeli attack on Iran?
Luti, meanwhile, scared a bunch of members of Congress in a conference call last month, according to [i]Time [/i]magazine http://www.time.com/time/maga...,9171,1101040913-692871,0 0.html :
... "A Democratic official tells [i]Time[/i] that a leading Pentagon hawk recently hinted that the doctrine of pre-emptive war could soon apply to potential new targets. During a private Aug. 19 conference call with Capitol Hill aides from both parties, sources say, senior Pentagon policy official William Luti said there are at least five or six foreign countries with traits that "no responsible leader can allow." An outspoken proponent of the Iraq war, Luti had declared at an October 2002 conference that the U.S. has "the right to ... hold accountable nations that harbor terrorists." In his recent call, Luti did not name the nations he had in mind but said they are led by dictators with weapons-of-mass-destructi on programs and close ties to terrorists. His remarks suggest that the Administration is looking well beyond the current "axis of evil," which includes Iran, Iraq and North Korea; this might put countries like Syria in the spotlight." ...
[b]Source:[/b]
Robert Dreyfuss, [i]The Dreyfuss Report[/i], TomPaine, http://www.tompaine.com
[b]Courtesy of WinstonSmith http://winstonsmith.tblog.com... [/b]
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| ...---... Is This Really Your Political Affiliation??? ... [See Graph] ... Hmmm ...---... |
| 09.08.04 (12:14 pm) [edit] |
[b]Is this really [i]your[/i] political affiliation??? ... [i]Hmmm[/i] ... Are you really [i]proud [/i]of the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta's [/i]"Mission UnAccomplished"-[i]cum[/i ]-nightmarish bloody fiasco in Iraq??? ... One can but[i] hope [/i]that the majority of Americans are smarter than [i]that[/i]!!! ...[/b]
[b]As the official death toll in Iraq climbs above the 1,005 mark, attacks against the US are accelerating ... [/b]Thanks to the despotic Bush/Cheney neo-con machine and their vile, traitorous pay-masters: Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc. ... Oh, yes and let's not forget the Saudi Royal Family and the real Prez of the USA: Israeli Likud Neo-Fascist Ariel Sharon!!! ...
[b]U.S. Conceding Rebels Control Regions of Iraq [Bush/Cheney really botched-it-up badly ... But then liars rarely succeed in the longer-term ...][/b]
WASHINGTON - As American military deaths in Iraq operations surpassed the 1,000 mark, top Pentagon officials said Tuesday that insurgents controlled important parts of central Iraq and that it was unclear when American and Iraqi forces would be able to secure those areas.
As of late Tuesday night, the Pentagon's accounting showed that 998 service members and three Defense Department civilians had been killed in Iraq operations.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference that the American strategy in retaking rebel-held strongholds hinged on training and equipping Iraqi forces to take the lead.
Mr. Rumsfeld said Iraqi officials understood they must regain control of the insurgent safe havens. "They get it, and will find a way over time to deal with it," he said.
But General Myers said the Iraqi forces would probably not be ready to confront insurgents in those areas until the end of this year.
Their comments, which came after a two-day spike in violence in Iraq led to a surge in American military deaths, represented an acknowledgment that the Americans had failed to end an increasingly sophisticated insurgency in important Sunni-dominated areas and in certain Shiite enclaves. Fighting raged on Tuesday in Sadr City, in Baghdad, as Shiite militiamen loyal to Moktada al-Sadr ended a self-declared cease-fire. [Page A14.]
The officials' assessment also underscored the difficulty of pacifying Iraq in time for elections scheduled for January. The cities of greatest rebel control are Ramadi, Falluja, Baquba and Samarra, in the so-called Sunni triangle, west and north of Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein remains popular and many forces loyal to him have gathered strength.
There is increasing concern in the administration over plans for the election, with some officials saying that if significant parts of the Sunni areas cannot be secured by January, it may be impossible to hold a nationwide balloting that would be seen as legitimate. Putting off the elections, though, would infuriate Iraq's Shiite majority. The elections are for an assembly that is to write a new constitution next year. Mr. Rumsfeld warned that the violence would intensify as elections approached.
Mr. Rumsfeld said that Prime Minister Ayad Allawi recognized that his government could not continue to allow rebel control in crucial areas of the country, but that it would take time for him to determine how to proceed.
"The prime minister and his team fully understand that it is important that there not be areas in that country that are controlled by terrorists," he said, adding that Dr. Allawi would deal with the problem by "negotiation and discussion" in some cases and by force in others.
Other administration officials, amplifying the secretary's comments, said the administration had decided to let Dr. Allawi try to persuade rebel leaders to join the process of reconstructing Iraq, or suffer the consequences if they did not.
"Allawi's strategy is to try to find people on the sidelines and wean the moderates away, to give them courage and a hope of reward for themselves," said an administration official. "He's telling them: 'I'm giving you an opportunity to meet your local concerns. You're going to be my guy, and together we'll try to isolate the extremists.' "
Administration officials say no decision has been made yet for American forces to attack those strongholds. The preference is for Iraqi forces to do the job, as they were said to have been poised to do last month in Najaf, the Shiite holy city.
But the record of the Iraqi security forces has not been inspiring, although some Iraqi forces fought well in Najaf, American officials said. While 95,000 soldiers have been trained and equipped up to American commanders' satisfaction, General Myers said, they will not be ready until the end of the year to join American forces in any assault against insurgent strongholds and then keep the peace afterward.
"While U.S. forces or coalition forces can do just about anything we want to do, it makes a lot more sense that it be a sustained operation, one that can be sustained by Iraqi security forces," General Myers said. "By December, we're going to have a substantial number of Iraqi security forces equipped, trained and led to conduct the kind of operations I was talking about."
A senior American official said force would be tried by the Iraqi government only after a couple of months' discussions with rebels.
"Force is the ultimate sanction, but let's exhaust the other ones first," he added.
A two-month hiatus before major force is applied to rebel areas would also mean a delay until after the American presidential election, but senior officials insist there is no domestic political calculus in the decision to wait - only a conviction that time is needed for negotiation and for Iraqi forces to gain strength.
"This is ultimately about building an Iraqi government which works for all of Iraq," said the official. "To the degree that we can wait a couple months and let Iraqi politics work, so much the better."
In describing the Iraqi forces, one American general in Iraq said in an e-mail message that their "capabilities are still uneven, but they're improving as we arm and equip them better, improve their infrastructure, give them additional training, and help them weed out the weak leaders." Mr. Rumsfeld added that Iraqis had recently conducted effective counterterrorism operations.
To buy time, General Myers said, Gen. George Casey, the top American commander in Iraq, is working with the Iraqi government to develop a strategy to retake the cities. General Myers said that strategy included trying to "isolate certain communities," hampering the insurgents' ability to rearm and resupply, and curtailing attacks against American forces. He said the strategy would also try "to set the conditions for the successful use of force later," military wording for preparing the battlefield by bombing safe houses and weapons caches, and encouraging residents to provide fresh intelligence on the location of insurgents.
Over the weekend, Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the land commander in Iraq, told The Associated Press that an American assault is likely in the next four months. "I do have about four months where I want to get to local control," General Metz said. "And then I've got the rest of January to help the Iraqis to put the mechanisms in place."
Maj. Gen. John R. Batiste, the commander of the Army's First Infantry Division, whose area north of Baghdad includes Tikrit and Samarra, disputed reports that the United States had given up in Samarra.
"Samarra is a city where Iraqis are taking charge to throw out anti-Iraqi forces," he said in an e-mail message on Tuesday. "No one has ceded the city to insurgents and there is no cordon. What we have in Samarra is the good people of Iraq, led by far-sighted provincial and city leadership, senior sheiks, and clerics, standing up to the enemy."
Residents, however, say insurgents effectively control Samarra.
General Batiste and other commanders gave an upbeat assessment, noting that "the messages at Friday Prayer are becoming more and more moderate" and that American forces "keep continuous pressure on the enemy" while they help Iraqis with reconstruction. In an unusual step for a Pentagon that tends to avoid citing body counts as a measure of success, Mr. Rumsfeld said American and allied forces had probably killed 1,500 to 2,500 insurgents last month.
But other American officials are more pessimistic about the prospects for regaining control of those areas. One noted, for example, that attacks on American forces rose to 2,700 in August, from 700 in March.
General Myers conceded that American forces faced a tough, adaptive foe. "The enemy is becoming more sophisticated in his efforts to destabilize the country," he said. - http://www.truthout.org/docs_...
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| ...---... Vote for Us or Die ...---... |
| 09.08.04 (9:51 am) [edit] |
[b]Who said:-- If you (the [i]voter[/i]) make "the wrong choice ... we'll get hit again" (i.e. you'll [i]die[/i])??? ... If you guessed Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein [i]and/or [/i]Robert Mugabe, then you might be surprised!!! ... Nope, it was none other than the cowardly traitor-[i]cum[/i]-asshol e 5-deferment Dicky-boy Cheney, the despicable neo-con, neo-fascist arm-chair chicken-hawk who sends others to die (along with his puppet-boy Dubya, the dry-drunk AWOL deserter) while he sits on his fat ass embezzling US taxpayer dollars ...[/b]
Speaking in Iowa yesterday, Vice President Cheney took fear mongering to a new level when he indicated that the United States risked suffering another terrorist attack http://www.channelnewsasia.co... if voters make "the wrong choice" in November. "It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2nd, we make the right choice," Cheney said, "because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again http://www.washingtonpost.com... . We'll be hit in a way that will be devastating." In January, 2002, President Bush assured Americans he had "no ambition whatsoever http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wo... to use [national security] as a political issue."
[b]SCARE TACTICS "IRRESPONSIBLE": [/b]Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State, weighed in on Cheney's comments: "I have heard a lot of outrageous statements at various times in my president's elections, but I think this kind of scare tactic by the vice president of the United States is irresponsible."
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| ...---... One Thousand and One (Now 1,003) - A Grim Reckoning ...---... |
| 09.08.04 (7:10 am) [edit] |
[b]On the day Operation Iraqi Freedom suffered the 1,000th death of a United States soldier, some quick numbers are in order:[/b]
1,095 days since the attacks of September 11;
538 days since the invasion and occupation of Iraq;
1,001 American soldiers dead in Iraq;
1,132 total Coalition soldiers dead in Iraq;
More than 20,000 'medical evacuations' of American soldiers from Iraq;
More than 10,000 civilians dead in Iraq;
0 weapons of mass destruction;
0 democratic elections in Iraq;
0 connections between Iraq and the attacks of September 11;
0 captures of Osama bin Laden, in Iraq or anywhere else;
$1.7 trillion to be spent on Iraq in the next decade, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences report by the Committee on International Security Studies (CISS).
Jane Bright wrote to me in November of 2003 http://truthout.org/docs_03/1... about the death of her son, one of the 1,001. "I must share with you," wrote Bright, "the obituary I wrote for my son, Sgt. Evan Ashcraft, who was killed July 24 near Mosul. I often think of the contributions my intelligent, sensitive wonderful son could have made. He could have been President of the United States. He could have been a doctor caring for children in a Third World Country. He had so much potential. He told us that when he came back from Iraq he wanted to help people. He said he had seen so much hatred and death that the only way to live his life was through aid to others. Look at what we've lost. The loss is not just mine, it's the world's loss. Evan will always be alive in my heart. He and all the other victims of this heinous action in Iraq must be more than mere numbers emerging from the Pentagon's daily tally. His death is a crime against humanity and the fault lies with the war criminals who inhabit our White House. Please share his story so that he may come alive to your readers."
Writer Bruce Mulkey spoke recently to Jane Bright, and wrote about his conversation in an essay titled 'Military Families Speak Out.' Bright said to him, "Several months ago when George Bush was performing his skit for the media in which he was looking under his desk and under chairs for weapons of mass destruction, I was horrified by the insensitivity of his performance. I thought to myself, here is the president of the United States making a joke out of a pre-emptive war and laughing about weapons of mass destruction, the basis for going to war, a war in which my dear son died, over 1,000 coalition troops have died and thousands of Iraqi civilians have died. How dare he!"
There are a lot of women like Jane Bright in America now.
Brooke Campbell lost her brother, Sergeant Ryan M. Campbell, in Iraq on April 29, 2004. In his last letter to her, Ryan wrote, "Just do me one big favor, OK? Don't vote for Bush. No. Just don't do it. I would not be happy with you."
Ms. Campbell, in a subsequent letter to George W. Bush, http://www.truthout.org/docs_... wrote, "I last saw my loved one at the Kansas City airport, staring after me as I walked away. I could see April 29 written on his sad, sand-chapped and sunburned face. I could see that he desperately wanted to believe that if he died, it would be while 'doing good,' as you put it. He wanted us to be able to be proud of him. Mr. President, you gave me and my mother a folded flag instead of the beautiful boy who called us 'Moms' and 'Brookster.' But worse than that, you sold my little brother a bill of goods. Not only did you cheat him of a long meaningful life, but you cheated him of a meaningful death."
At some point, you simply run out of words. 1,000 dead soldiers in Iraq, no weapons of mass destruction, no connection to September 11, torture and rape of men, women and children at Abu Ghraib prison, the outing of a deep-cover CIA officer for political revenge, Rumsfeld ally Ahmad Chalabi spying for Iran, the Israeli spy in the Pentagon, all the dead civilians everywhere, the substantial failures of Bush et al. on September 11, the crater in the economy, a gutted health care system, the abandonment of the elderly, the evisceration of the environment, and a federal budget deficit that guarantees a bleak future for anyone planning to be alive sometime in the next ten years...
At some point, you simply run out of words. Let us instead have a moment of silence for those 1,001 soldiers, and all the civilians who have joined them in the Iraqi dust.
[b]"We the People" should[i] firstly [/i]weep and hang our collective heads in shame for the death, misery and atrocities committed in our names by the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] -- Then [i]secondly[/i] we should vote the neo-con, neo-fascist Bushies out of office on November 2nd ...[/b]
[b]Source:[/b]
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and international bestseller of two books - [i]'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' [/i]and 'The [i]Greatest Sedition is Silence[/i].' - http://www.truthout.org/docs_...
[b]Courtesy of WinstonSmith http://winstonsmith.tblog.com... [/b]
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| ...---... Economic Policy Institute:-- State of Working America ...---... |
| 09.08.04 (7:08 am) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" have been ruthlessly betrayed by the corrupt neo-con Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] ... Poverty, joblessness, homelessness and a lack of health care for our citizens have[i] all [/i]sharply risen since the insane neo-fascist Bush regime took over and hijacked our nation for the sake of rapacious corporations, wealthy plutocrats and their greedy corporate cronies ... The staggering deficit spending by the corporate-take-all Bushies is considered reckless by conservative, independent and liberal-minded economists alike ... "We the People" will be forced to shoulder the burden of this unconscionable debt, the interest payments of which will go to the Bush Crime Family, rapacious corporations, wealthy plutocrats and their greedy corporate cronies ... "Connect-the-Dots"!!! ... [/b]
The[i] State of Working America 2004/2005[/i], which the Economic Policy Institute released Sunday, offers a detailed look at the effect this jobs deficit is having on American working people and their families. This 9th edition – written by EPI’s president Lawrence Mishel, senior economist.
Jared Bernstein, and economist Sylvia Allegretto – paints a comprehensive portrait of the condition of the economy and its impact on jobs, wages, wealth, and living standards. The data it presents are the most recent available at press time, July 2004.
[b]Go To Report Homepage:[/b] http://www.epinet.org/content... .
[b]Courtesy of WinstonSmith http://winstonsmith.tblog.com... [/b]
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| ...---... Coincidences are the Strangest Things ...---... |
| 09.07.04 (4:22 pm) [edit] |
[b]An obscene pattern has emerged of terrorist warnings and scare tactics employed by the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] that always seems to occur about the time that Dubya's popularity is waning with our sleepy-headed public ... [i]Hmmm[/i] ... Can you "connect-the-dots"??? ... [/b]
[b]Coincidences are the strangest things ...[/b]
[i]AP[/i]: 'U.S. death toll in Iraq passes 1,000 mark' http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/s... ... 4:27 PM, Sept. 7th, 2004
[i]AP[/i]: 'Ridge: Terrorists hope to disrupt election' http://seattlepi.nwsource.com...%20Terrorism ... 4:40 PM, Sept. 7th, 2004
[b]And then we've got this classic piece of shit from the insane Bushies' neo-fascist thugs & neo-con goons:[/b]
[b]Slimy as they wanna be ...[/b]
[b]Cheney:[/b] Kerry Victory Will Bring Devastating Terrorist Attack.
(The [i]AP'[/i]s got the story http://apnews.myway.com/artic... .)
[b]...[i] Jeez [/i]...[/b]
[b]Source:[/b]
Joshua Micah Marshall, TalkingPointsMemo, http://www.talkingpointsmemo....
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| ...---... Bush's Neo-Con Legacy: Death Toll Rises, Injury Tolls Rises & Economic Failure ...---... |
| 09.07.04 (2:33 pm) [edit] |
[b]Dubya is an abject failure on every front, here at home [i]and[/i] abroad ... The neo-con, neo-fascist Bush/Cheney regime is a miserable failure and we (American working people) will bear the horrendous brunt and burden of its' bungling incompetence and unconscionable corruption ...[/b]
[u][b]U.S. death toll at 1,000 as forces battle al-Sadr[/b][/u]
[i]MSNBC[/i] reports http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5... : BAGHDAD, Iraq - As U.S. forces again battled insurgents loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, the White House said Tuesday that the U.S. death toll in Iraq had reached 1,000 nearly 18 months after U.S.-led forces invaded the country to topple the government of former President Saddam Hussein.
[u][b]Injury toll hits all-time high[/b][/u]
The [i]Washington Post [/i]reports http://www.washingtonpost.com... : "About 1,100 U.S. soldiers and Marines were[b] wounded in Iraq during August[/b], by far the highest combat injury toll for any month since the war began and an indication of the intensity of battles flaring in urban areas."
[u][b]Nearly 7,000 U.S. troops injured in Iraq, says Pentagon[/b][/u]
The [i]Associated Press [/i]reports http://seattletimes.nwsource.... : The number of American troops wounded in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 is approaching 7,000, according to figures published yesterday by the Pentagon. The death toll for U.S. military personnel is 975, plus three Defense Department civilians.
[b][u]The Economy Has Turned the Corner … Into a Dead End[/u][/b]
The [i]Center for American Progress [/i]reports http://www.americanprogress.o... : Examining disappearing job growth, wage growth's new record low, and how households are getting squeezed by higher costs. Check-out the graphs on http://www.americanprogress.o... ...
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| ...---... The Turn-around Commences ...---... |
| 09.07.04 (9:46 am) [edit] |
[b]The lede of this[i] AP [/i]article reads:[/b] "Democrat John Kerry accused President Bush on Monday of sending U.S. troops to the “wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time” and said he’d try to bring them all home in four years. Bush rebuked him for taking “yet another new position” on the war."
[u]Simple advice for the Kerry campaign[/u]: keep the fire concentrated and tightly focused. The Democrats message on this is simple: the president lied the country into the war and then he screwed it up.
[i]One, two. Two points[/i]. Simple as that. Everything else obscures the message. Both on principle and for tactical reasons, I don't think one presidential candidate should call the other a liar (call me old-fashioned). But the point can be made with appropriate language and surrogates can be more direct.
And as long as the president keeps misrepresenting Kerry's position on the war, starting him on flipflops. Which ones? Wanting to make Chalabi president of Iraq, now accusing him of being an Iranian spy. Wanting to have Halliburton run Iraq, now pulling their contracts. The list is truly endless.
These are sweeteners to be added for variety and entertainment. The two points above are the keys -- to be hit on again and again and again. They're effective because they're true and any look at the polls shows the public knows it.
Refer to "Dubya's "Bounce" Turns Into A "Thud" As The Race Turns DEAD EVEN!!!" on http://www.tblog.com/template...
[b]Source:[/b]
Joshua Micah Marshall, TalkingPoints, http://www.talkingpointsmemo....
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| ...---... Spin Cycle ...---... |
| 09.07.04 (8:46 am) [edit] |
[b]The authors of[i] All the President's Spin [/i]discuss the current arms race of political spin, the Bush politics of dishonesty, and the future of American democracy ...[/b]
In a market filled with books documenting President Bush's shaky relationship with the truth, there is a new entry: [i]All the President's Spin[/i] http://www.spinsanity.org/boo... . Penned by the three young founder-editors of [i]Spinsanity[/i].com http://www.spinsanity.com/ , the book meticulously documents just how Bush has been able to deceive the nation – on Iraq, his tax cuts, or stem cell research – and, more importantly, get away with it.
Although Democrats themselves, Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan take a non-partisan approach to a man they describe as the "highest profile carrier of a virus infecting our political system." It is a book that takes issue not with the president's policies but the damage he has wreaked on a democracy through his "politics of dishonesty." The authors also argue that the responsibility for the precarious state of our political system, however, is equally shared by the media which prefers to abide by an arid definition of objectivity than serve the public interest.
AlterNet spoke on the phone with the authors who are variously based in Los Angeles, New York City, and Durham, North Carolina.
[b]Why did you decide write this book, given that there are so many other book bashing Bush out there already?[/b]
Brendan Nyhan: We felt like the books out there on Bush don't really do justice to what has gone on over the last four years. Bush is the leader in the arms race of political spin. But no one was adequately explaining how he was getting away with it or focusing on how the media has let him get away with it.
[b]Did you feel that the other books were not tough enough on him or is it that they were too shrill in accusing him of lying?[/b]
Bryan Keefer: There are a lot of Bush-bashing books out there – for example, David Corn's book is called [i]The Lies of George W. Bush[/i] http://www.bushlies.com/ . But the administration is in fact very good at not lying, saying things that have a kernel of truth but when taken as a whole are very misleading. We've got dozens of examples of this type of thing in the book. For example, they'll take a quote out of context.
So they don't lie. It's a very careful strategy because if they say something that is really untrue then the media will get you. If you say something really misleading but there is a grain of truth there then the media won't go after you.
[b]So do you agree with the decision of many in the media to avoid using the word "lie" when it comes to Bush?[/b]
Keefer: We do document three things that are lies in the book that are demonstrably untrue.
The problem is that the media doesn't adequately explain what is going on. They won't come out and say, Bush made this misleading claim.
There is a piece in the Washington Post today on Rudy Giuliani's speech attacking John Kerry. The way the article is framed is that he took certain things out of context. But these (statements) were vicious misrepresentations of Kerry's positions. The problem is that the media frames these kinds of things in a very tepid, he said/she said kind of way. They don't explain it adequately because they are constrained by the need to appear balanced. And the way they've interpreted objectivity, to me, is rolling over.
[b]It seems then that the problem is not so much lies as an impoverished notion of truth. Today, the media has decided, as Clinton did, it is really about what your definition of [i]is[/i] is – they've bought into this hair-splitting notion of what is true.[/b]
Ben Fritz: The media is afraid to impose its interpretation. As a result, they're letting everyone else define what is true. And different sides have different interests in defining what is is, to use that metaphor. What it means for a tax-cut to benefit the middle class, what it means to have a unilateral invasion, or have 60 stem cell lines available for research.
In refusing to impose itself, the media is making a choice too. It's why the politicians get away with so much. As we say in the book, it would be better if the media took a stance, even if it wasn't a truly objective stance. It would give us a better way of dealing with politicians who are defining the truth as they see fit.
Hasn't it been the great American tradition of journalism to discover the truth? So how did we get to this point where we have journalists that are reluctant to put forward what the facts are?
Nyhan: They do try and say what the facts are in a general sense, but in this he said/she said kind of way. But they won't go beyond that in making the kind of judgments that Ben was just talking about. And that has a long history in American journalism.
The way the American press has interpreted objectivity since the early twentieth century has pushed the press into the role of essentially being a stenographer.
[b]So what you're saying is that this was always a weakness in the American media system. And what has changed is that the politicians – since Reagan and then Clinton and now Bush - have become better at exploiting it.[/b]
Nyhan: That's exactly right. They've realized what they can get away with without triggering the Watergate-type coverage that Nixon received.
The press needs to adjust. The argument we're making is that the press needs to recognize that they're being out-gunned here and think about objectivity in a different way. They need to think about how they're asking of readers here, to adjudicate between these he said/she said claims on all these disputes. It's almost impossible for the average person to figure out who is right.
[b]In writing about the 2004 elections campaign, you point out that John Kerry also uses some of these same kind of tactics of manipulation. If so, why doesn't it work as well for the Democrats?[/b]
Keefer: It does work when they do it. The unemployment numbers are probably the best case in point. They take the private sector number and claim it is the net job loss number. And the media is just as reluctant to call him on it.
Look, the argument we make is that Bush has been doing this for four years. He's really taken advantage of the weaknesses of the media well beyond anything Reagan or Clinton knew how to do. So just by dint of experience and better strategy, he's just more practiced at it.
Fritz: The Republicans also have a better infrastructure for this kind of stuff. There are more conservative partisan media outlets, more media-savvy think tanks, etc.
But if you look at organizations like the Center for American Progress and the liberal media becoming more aggressive, I think liberals realize that in the interest of winning the short-term spin war, they need to build up their infrastructure. Now that may be good for liberals in the short run, it may not be good for democracy in the long run.
[b]You write: "Given recent trends in American politics, Bush's misleading tactics could very well become the norm." One of the solutions you argue for is a new kind of objectivity, but given that newsrooms are being pressured by shorter news cycles and are increasingly profit-driven, how realistic is that?[/b]
Keefer: Major news organizations can do whatever they put their mind to. The New York Times has plenty of reporters. If they dedicated two researchers to the campaign full-time that their reporters could call back to and say, "Fact-check this," that would be it. That's all they would really need to do to keep up with this stuff. As media consolidation puts pressure on people, it's tough. But if they want to do it, they can do it.
Nyhan: In terms of what can drive it, members of public need to push them to do it. In the spin-driven 24 hour news cycle that we have now, it's actually a way for quality media outlets to distinguish themselves. You can get the news instantly from a wide variety of sources. That's not much of a value-add for most media outlets.
People are overwhelmed by that information; there's too much of it. There's a real hunger out there for news outlets that give them context, give them facts. There's either he said/she said reporting or, on the other hand, shrill talking heads screaming at each other, there's a valuable middle ground that's being lost. News outlets will find an audience for that kind of work.
[b]Do you feel a little bit of that is going on? That the news media feel that their credibility is being challenged or threatened?[/b]
Fritz: They have to be aware of that for a number of reasons. They are struggling for credibility. They're struggling for an audience. Journalists, more and more, feel angry and frustrated at the way they're being spun. They know what's going on. They're not idiots. News organizations and individuals in them who want to have more credibility than insurance salesmen among the public want to find ways to do this.
Complaining about this kind of deception can sometimes sound a bit like complaining about reality TV. We all hate reality TV, but guess which show has the highest ratings. Don't you think that the responsibility in the end rests with the American public? They have to decide to punish media outlets or politicians for using these tactics?
Keefer: In part, a lot of the responsibility is on the media's shoulders. It is the mediating institution. There are not a lot of ways that Americans interact with the political system or have access to information from sources that fall outside the media.
That said, we talk about it a little bit – blogs, in particular. There is a thriving culture of press criticism on the web that is beginning to have an impact. Media organizations will listen to that and open themselves up. In the wake of the Iraq war and the way they covered it, they understand that they did it very poorly. So in some ways, writing a blog is a new way of democratic participation.
[b]So who is the audience for this book – the average American, journalists?[/b]
Nyhan: I think the audience is all of the above. It's been an interesting experience, both as Spinsanity has grown and with the book. We hear from such a wide swath of people. We had a 17-year-old Republican in Georgia who really liked our book. From him to professional journalists. There isn't really as much out there that breaks down the techniques and lets you see how you are being spun.
[b]Do you think the younger generation is more skeptical? People who grew up on MTV, you know you are always being sold to all the time.[/b]
Nyhan: That's true. We're all in our twenties and we know that. But for people who still have some faith that politics matters a little bit more than Nikes or Pepsi, it's frustrating. Because we can see that the political ads or the way politicians talk is just slightly less professional than what we see in television commercials. So I think young people are the perfect audience. We really understand this stuff because it's been around for our whole lives. We know the system sucks. Understanding how it works, seeing the reasons and knowing that it doesn't have to be this way – that is a positive message for people who've grown up in this culture.
[b]Source:[/b]
Lakshmi Chaudhry is senior editor of [i]AlterNet.[/i] - http://www.alternet.org
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| ...---... Dubya's "Bounce" Turns Into A "Thud" As The Race Turns DEAD EVEN!!! ...---... |
| 09.07.04 (7:53 am) [edit] |
[b]While the media keeps featuring the[i] Time/Newsweek [/i]polls with Bush 11% ahead, [i]Rasmussen's[/i] daily tracking poll for Tuesday 9-7-04 has the race DEAD EVEN: 47.3%-47.3%. [/b]We fearlessly predict that Kerry will lead in Wednesday's poll. Call the media and tell them they are lying about Bush's Bounce - and get back to work registering pro-Kerry voters!
Refer to "Presidential Tracking Poll: Bush-Kerry" on http://www.rasmussenreports.c...
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| ...---... ‘We Don’t Want Our Loved Ones Who Died in 9/11 Used as an Excuse to Start War’ ... |
| 09.06.04 (12:54 pm) [edit] |
[b]Relatives of terror victims are foremost in the mass demonstrations that show not everyone loves Bush ... In fact, no one with a conscientious brain-[i]and[/i]-integrit y could possibly love Bush ...[/b]
DAN Jones starts to cry. He's in the middle of Union Square in New York City and he's trying to explain how his children felt when they lost their favorite uncle - his brother-in-law - on September 11, 2001. Jones is one of the founders of the September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows organization and it's been a rough week for him.
His brother-in-law, he feels, has been wrapped in the Stars And Stripes and his death expropriated by the Republican Party, which has come to town just days before the third anniversary of the attacks on America for its pre-election convention.
The decision to hold the convention just a few blocks from the site where nearly 3000 people died in the World Trade Center attacks has been condemned by many opponents of the Republican Party as a gross exploitation of America's suffering. Each day of the convention has invoked the memory of 9/11 as a reason to "never forget and never forgive"; each day delegates have called on September 11 as a reason to justify war.
If the convention and the memory of his family's loss has made this a harrowing week emotionally for Jones, then it's also been a hard few days for him physically too. He's just completed the mammoth task of dragging a 5000lb tombstone - inscribed with the words "to the unknown civilians killed in war" - from Boston to New York in time for the convention. The "Stonewalk" saw some 500 people, led by Jones, pulling this hulk of granite along the same route that the planes which crashed into the twin towers took when they were taken over by the 9/11 hijackers.
The Tombstone now takes Center stage in Union Square. This usually bohemian, bustling little patch of ground has now been turned into a shrine for all those who have died since 9/11. Surrounding the tombstone are 978 pairs of boots - a set for every soldier who has died in Iraq. Hundreds of kids' shoes and women's shoes and the shoes of men are there as well - each pair representing a dead Iraqi. The names of all those who have died during the invasion and occupation of Iraq are being read out as Jones tries to describe the pain and anger his family has felt - pain at losing his children's uncle, Bill Kelly, and anger at the Bush administration for using their suffering, as they see it, as an excuse for war across the globe.
Bill Kelly was at a breakfast meeting at the Windows on the World restaurant at the World Trade Center when the first plane struck. His body was never found. "My children lost their favorite uncle," says Jones, a 39-year-old social worker in the New York school system. "We didn't want to see any other family going through what we did. My children are still very afraid. The shock and horror hasn't left them. No other children anywhere in the world should go through what they went through. The city in which they live saw planes crashing into buildings and the buildings falling down.
"We knew that if our country waged war that other families would be put in the same position that our family was put in - children would lose uncles and parents, people would lose their brothers and sisters, parents would lose their children.
"We wanted justice, not war. War is no way to get justice. It took a long time for the man who blew up the plane over Lockerbie to come to justice, but it happened in the end. We wanted this pursued as a crime, not to be considered as an act of war. The war in Afghanistan has not brought those who plotted my brother-in-law's murder to justice. And the war in Iraq has certainly not served that purpose either."
The tombstone that he and the other members of September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows dragged to New York is meant to quietly and symbolically show their President what they think of his foreign policy as he staged his party's national convention.
Not every protester is as eloquent as Jones and the 200 or so other families in his organization, but nearly all share his sentiments.
Since last Sunday - the day before the convention started - New York has been a sea of protest. Sunday alone saw some 200,000 people take to the streets in a demonstration aimed solely at one man - George W Bush. The poor, the homeless, military veterans, former police officers and firefighters who responded to 9/11, the gay community, the unemployed, anarchists, hippies, Muslims, Christians, soccer moms - someone from every segment of the myriad ways of life in America - has taken to the streets of New York this last week to tell their President to stop what he is doing and to let him know that they want him out of the White House this November. Most have been dignified and some have been silly - such as the panty protest down at Battery Park where women flashed their knickers bearing slogans like "F*** Bush". Only a very few have been violent and a handful have been pointless - there was more than a couple of wasted stoners desperately wandering New York looking for something to protest about but unable to locate the nearest demonstration.
The police arrested more than 2000 people, many for the slightest infractions. The NYPD has operated a policy of pre-emptive arrest, cracking down hard on anyone who so much as steps out of line. But although draconian, the police were mostly not too heavy-handed with the protesters. That's not surprising.
Few would have had the guts to test the patience of the police in a city that looked as if martial law had been declared. Giant spy blimps floated over the city as helicopters patrolled the skies. On every street corner in Manhattan there were dozens of police officers. Streets were blocked off in all directions by anti-car bomb barriers. Flotillas of motorcycle cops sped around as officers on horseback and with batons drawn idled in the streets. Madison Square Garden itself looked as if it was under siege, ringed by secret service agents, the National Guard and thousands of police officers armed to the teeth. This was not a city taking any chances. New Yorkers were sure that there was going to be a terrorist attack.
The Republicans have delighted in disparaging the demonstrators as a bunch of leftie hippies who have cost the city a fortune in security.
The response from the demonstrators is that the Republicans should have taken their convention somewhere else. But Jones is not the type of protester that the Republicans are likely to pick on. He's their worst nightmare - a victim of terrorism who is also a pacifist and an opponent of America's wars. As bells ring in Union Square for everyone who has died in the Iraq war, Jones says: "The philosophy of our organization is to highlight civilian deaths. Our family members went to work, got on airplanes, went to breakfast, responded to an emergency and were killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. We don't want our loved ones used as an excuse to start war. Yet the death toll of the innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan just keeps going up. Like our families, these people were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"We just want peace and justice. Our organization takes its name from something that Martin Luther King said - 'wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows'. That's all we want - a peaceful tomorrow, and these wars we are involved in are no way to bring that about. The stone that we've brought to New York is a compliment to the tomb of the unknown soldier. It is a mark of respect to the suffering and anguish of the families of soldiers who have lost loved ones overseas. It's a reminder about the human toll of war.'
As Jones speaks the names of Iraqi children are read out. "Some of them were just two years old," Jones says. "I have children and it is horrible to think of the one day of terror that we lived through in New York.
"But the nightly bombings in Iraq is terror raining down every day, and the soldiers over there wondering each time a car passes whether or not it is going to blow them up are living with a constant threat of death."
American politics, Jones says, has become a "fiery cocktail". "These wars haven't made my country safer," he adds, "and even if they had, the means aren't justified. The entire world is a far more dangerous place, due in large part to the actions of my government."
Jones believes that what is happening overseas is an act of revenge. He quotes an old college buddy of his - a navy veteran - who told him that it was military doctrine that no army should take part in a war for the sake of vengeance because it is dishonorable and the military lives or dies by its honor.
"If the horror of those pictures from Abu Ghraib prison hasn't shocked us into admitting that we have no moral authority any more, then I don't know what can stop this," he says. "The genie is out of the bottle and I don't know how to get it back in. I wish I did."
Jones hasn't lost hope though. He says he and all the other millions of protesters around America have to keep on protesting for their children and the belief in a "peaceful tomorrow".
"My children miss their uncle greatly," he says, coughing as his voice fills up with tears. "Their experiences have prepared them for life at much too young an age.
"It's painful for them, very painful. It's painful for all of us - both here and abroad. The pain has to stop." - http://www.commondreams.org/h...
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| ...---... Labor Day ...---... |
| 09.06.04 (10:46 am) [edit] |
[b]Labor Day
By Gov. Howard Dean M.D.[/b]
On Labor Day, Americans ought to consider the struggles of the average worker in this country. It has not been easy to survive the current economic climate - wages have not kept pace with even the modest inflation we have had over the past few years. Those earning minimum wage have seen living standards virtually collapse in the last 30 years. There are many more working Americans who have lost all or most of their benefits, including health insurance. And, there are one million more Americans out of work then there were four years ago.
There are a lot of reasons why.
Republicans, who seem to run most everything these days, are hostile to organized labor and to working people in general. President Reagan fired the first shot when he decertified the air traffic controllers union 23 years ago, and organized labor has yet to recover. The most recent hostile action was Gov. George Pataki's (R-NY) veto of a minimum wage bill which would have raised the minimum wage to the same level we have here in Vermont as of January 1, 2004 - $7.00/hour.
Organized labor used to get plenty of bad press. From the Central States Pension Fund scandals that revealed union leaders stealing members' money, to the proven connections between labor leaders and organized crime, to unions at war with the progress being made on race relations. Not to mention, the labor movement has weathered its fair share of corruption.
But, we should all be grateful that labor unions don't give up easily. For example, in June, the nation's largest labor union sponsored a day of marches all over the country in support of universal health insurance, even though most members of unions already have that benefit under their contracts. And, the AFL-CIO has been leading the fight for years for a higher minimum wage. Taking a role in these issues proves that organized labor is now one of the leading progressive forces in America, fighting not only for its own members, but for millions of Americans who are not union members and do not pay any union dues.
The success of American capitalism depends on most Americans believing that the system works for all of us, not just those who have a lot of money. In the 1980s, Republicans believed that labor unions were too powerful. Today they are too weak, and those who work for a living are rapidly being deprived of a fair reward for their work. If you want America to succeed, this must change. We need to make it easier to organize low-wage workers and immigrants, so that they will have some hope achieving home ownership and college educations for their kids.
We need to make it easier to organize middle class Americans so their dreams will be preserved in the face of Republican policies which take money from wage earners in the form of higher costs for local services, health and education.
All Americans ought to remember that achieving fairness and balance is the key to long term success of the country. We are rapidly alienating middle class and working families which, ultimately, makes America weaker. To re-establish that balance, a good first step is to restore the ability of organized labor to stand up for all American workers.
------------------------- ------------------------- ------------------------- -----
[b] Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont, is the founder of Democracy for America, a grassroots organization that supports socially progressive and fiscally responsible political candidates. Email Howard Dean on howarddean@democracyforam erica.com [/b]
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| ...---... No Picnic ...---... |
| 09.06.04 (6:58 am) [edit] |
[b]The Mad King George and his corrupt cabal of neo-con spies, traitors, murderers-[i]cum[/i]-tort urers, war-profiteers, thugs and goons have all betrayed America ...
This Labor Day, most U.S. workers are worse off than they were at this time last year.[/b]
Labor Day 2004 is anything but a picnic for the vast majority of America's 147 million member labor force. No matter how you slice it, most US workers are worse off than they were at this time last year.
The average real wage – that is, adjusted for inflation – has actually fallen over the past year. This is in spite of the fact that the economy has grown by 4.7 percent. In other words, even when the economy is growing, most of the people who make it grow aren't getting anything out of it.
This continues a long-term trend – briefly interrupted in the late 1990s – that has dominated the last 30 years. Over the last three decades the median real wage has grown by only about 8 percent. In other words, the majority of the American labor force has failed to share in the gains from economic growth.
This by itself is an outrage and ought to be a major political issue in an election year. Prior to the "Age of Greed" it was normal for the wages of most workers to grow with productivity. If that had happened over the past three decades, the typical (median) family income would be more than $60,000, instead of the $43,300 that it is today.
This is not a utopian "what if" scenario but rather what would have actually occurred if most American workers had not lost so much bargaining power. Most of this loss stems from policy changes rather than just "market forces." For example, the decline in union membership and strength results from legal and institutional changes that have made it extremely difficult for workers to organize unions and bargain collectively. Tens of thousands of workers are illegally fired each year for organizing or attempting to join a union, and companies can refuse to bargain with unions for years even when they are legally obligated to do so. Human Rights Watch found that the United States had a "culture of near impunity" for employers who violate basic labor rights.
Our trade and commercial agreements with other countries have also been deliberately designed to drive down the wages of most workers, while protectionism for professionals – doctors and lawyers, for example – remains intact. It is no wonder that most of the massive redistribution of income of recent decades has gone from the bottom half of the labor force to professional and other highly-paid employees.
To reverse these trends, we will need real labor law reform that restores collective bargaining rights for American labor. But it will still be difficult to make up for 30 years of losses. So labor's best hope for the foreseeable future is probably going to be found in universal programs, such as health care, where workers are currently losing ground as employers cut back on benefits and increase employee co-payments. Most European workers have not only universal health insurance but four or five weeks of vacation a year, paid family leave and often subsidized child care as well. Their societies are no richer than ours; they just have different priorities.
In the case of health care, our costs are so out of control – we spend nearly twice as much per person as other developed countries and still leave a sixth of our population uninsured – that reform will be increasingly difficult to avoid. But universal reforms that allow workers to share in the prosperity that their labor creates also have the advantage – like Social Security and Medicare – of a broad political appeal that makes them easier to win and preserve. If we can make some progress in these areas by next year's labor day, then maybe American labor will have something to celebrate.
[b]Source:[/b]
Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., http://www.alternet.org/story...
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| ...---... Has Dubya Fallen Off The Wagon Again??? ...---... |
| 09.05.04 (9:31 am) [edit] |
[b]Well, you can't say Bush and Rove didn't ask for it.[/b]
Bush's return to drinking is apparently common knowledge in DC, though it seems unlikely anyone will talk on the record.
The abortion story is old news, but seemed to be solid, at least by Swift Boat standards: the woman in question denies it, but the two then-friends who drove her to the (illegal) abortion mill have supposedly signed affidavits.
It's Stevenson's challenge to Nixon: if you don't stop telling lies about us, we're going to have to start telling the truth about you. Bush has been asked politely, and he hasn't. Now it's our turn.
[u][b]Lies move Democrats to dig up dirt[/b][/u] http://www.myrtlebeachonline....
My Democratic friends are mad as hell, and they aren't going to take it any more.
They are worried, having watched as another August smear campaign, full of lies and half-truths, takes its toll in the polls.
They are frustrated, mostly at the Kerry campaign, for naively believing that just because all the newspapers and news organizations that investigated the charges of the Swift Boat assassins found them to be full of lies and half-truths, they wouldn't take their toll. The word on the street is that Kerry was ready to fire back the day the story broke, but that his campaign, believing the charges would blow over if they ignored them, counseled restraint.
But most of all, activist Democrats are angry. As one who lived through an August like this, 16 years ago - replete with rumors that were lies, which the Bush campaign claimed they had nothing to do with and later admitted they had planted - I'm angry, too. I've been to this movie. Lies move numbers.
Remember the one about Dukakis suffering from depression after he lost the governorship? We lost six points over that lie, planted by George W.'s close friend and colleague in the 1988 campaign, Lee Atwater. Or how about the one about Kitty Dukakis burning a flag at an anti-war demonstration, another out-and-out lie, which the Bush campaign denied having anything to do with, except that it turned out to have come from a United States senator via the Republican National Committee? Atwater later apologized to me for that, too, on his deathbed. Did I mention that Lee's wife is connected to the woman running the Swift Boat campaign?
What do you do, Democrats keep asking each other.
The answer is not pretty, but everyone knows what it is.
The trouble with Democrats, traditionally, is that we're not mean enough. Too much is at stake to play by Dukakis' rules and lose again. That is the conclusion Democrats have reached. So watch out. Millions of dollars will be on the table. And there are plenty of choices for what to spend it on.
Will it be the three, or is it four or five, drunken driving arrests that Bush and Cheney, the two most powerful men in the world, managed to rack up?
After Vietnam, nothing is ancient history, and Cheney is still drinking. What their records suggest is not only a serious problem with alcoholism, which Bush but not Cheney has acknowledged, but also an even more serious problem of judgment.
What if Bush were to fall off the wagon? Then what? Has America really faced the fact that we have an alcoholic as our president?
Or how about Dead Texans for Truth, highlighting those who served in Vietnam instead of the privileged draft-dodging president, and ended up as names on the wall instead of members of the Air National Guard.
Or maybe it will be Texas National Guardsmen for Truth, who can explain exactly what George W. Bush was doing while John Kerry was putting his life on the line. Perhaps with money on the table, or investigators on their trail, we will learn just what kind of wild and crazy things the president was doing while Kerry was saving a man's life, facing enemy fire and serving his country.
Or could it be George Bush's Former Female Friends for Truth. A forthcoming book by Kitty Kelley raises questions about whether the president has practiced what he preaches on abortion. As Larry Flynt discovered, a million dollars loosens lips. Are there others to be loosened?
Are you shocked? Remember Dukakis? Now he teaches at Northeastern University. John Kerry has been very fair in dealing with the Swift Boat charges. That's why so many of my Democrat friends have decided to stop talking to the campaign, and start putting money together independently.
The arrogant little Republican boys who strutted around New York this week, claiming that they have this one won, would do well to take a step back. It could be a long and ugly road to November.
[b]By Susan Estrich[/b], http://www.myrtlebeachonline....
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| ...---... By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them ...---... |
| 09.05.04 (6:50 am) [edit] |
[b]A powerful excerpt from Miller's book, "Cruel and Unusual," arguing that Bush is inching us toward a theocratic White House.[/b]
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 6, [i]The Clear and Present Danger[/i], from Mark Crispin Miller's book, "[i]Cruel and Unusual: Bush and Cheney's New World Order[/i]" on http://www.wwnorton.com/catal... ...
The radical collapse of all distinction between church and state and the promotion of an angry "Christianity" as the USA's official state religion have grown increasingly apparent as the Bush regime has turned more grandiose and reckless after 9/11. That revolutionary program has gradually come into view despite the press's failure to expose it, and despite the random efforts of the White House to conceal it ("Well, I – first of all, I would never justify – I would never use God to promote policy decisions," Bush said, without conviction, to Brit Hume in an interview on September 22, 2003). A cursory survey of Bush/Cheney's foreign and domestic innovations will make clear that from the start, this regime has been hard at work transforming the United States into a theocratic system, and, globally, at the gradual creation of a nominally Christian New World Order.
Although the president made quite a show of mounting no rhetorical attack on Islam or on Muslims in the dark days after 9/11, as if to reassure the world that the United States was not intent on waging a religious war, that tolerant pose was shortly overwhelmed, those words of peace obliterated, by much graphic counter-evidence. The United States was obviously mounting a "crusade" – as Bush himself so tactlessly announced on September 16, 2001. All he meant was "a broad cause," Ari Fleischer reassured reporters two days later, and yet Muslim residents of the United States (and of Afghanistan) could not be blamed for thinking otherwise. At once John Ashcroft's troops began to sweep illegally through Muslim neighborhoods, hauling off "suspected terrorists" by the hundreds and treating them as enemy aliens, and there was like harassment by police departments all across the country.
Soon, moreover, some of Bush's best-known co-religionists and sometime spiritual advisers started venting anti-Muslim propaganda. Franklin Graham called Islam "a very evil and very wicked religion," and Pat Robertson, who compared the Koran to "Mein Kampf," declared, projectively, about the Muslims: "They want to coexist until they can control, dominate and then, if need be, destroy." Said Jerry Falwell: "I think Muhammad was a terrorist." The White House offered no rebuke.
Bush himself has carefully avoided venting such anti-Islamic sentiments in public. He has also tried not to repeat the word "crusade," or otherwise betray the war-like zeal that motivates his strain of Christianity. At this he has been less successful, unable, as he is, to mask his true intentions and desires. Five months after urging his "crusade" on 9/16, he did it once again in speaking to our troops in Anchorage. (The Canadians, he said, "stand with us in this incredibly important crusade to defend freedom, this campaign to do what is right for our children and our grandchildren.") I am not a fanatic, Bush sometimes tries to say – and then, as ever, contradicts his wan pretense at moderation and humility with some insanely grandiose remark. "I'm surely not going to justify war based upon God," he awkwardly assured Bob Woodward. However, Woodward also reports the president's explanation for his refusal to consult his dad for guidance: "You know, he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to."
God told him to run for president, Bush says, and God told him to strike al Qaeda, and God told him to occupy Iraq. "I haven't suffered doubt," Bush said to Woodward (adding, without irony, "I hope I'm able to convey that in a humble way"). For all his weak demurrals, Bush does in fact perceive the "war on terrorism" as a new crusade, as a member of his family makes explicit:
[i]George sees this as a religious war. He doesn't have a p.c. view of the war. His view of this is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know[/i].
Of course, it would be comforting to see this only as a case of individual mania, which reasonable people – Christian and non-Christian – might shrug off. And yet this is no laughing matter, as Bush is not alone in his apocalyptic frame of mind, but aided and abetted very powerfully. Having variously seized our nation's government, the GOP also pursues "religious war."
In a fund-raising letter mailed on March 3, 2004, Marc Racicot, director of the Bush/Cheney's "re-election" drive, again deployed the c-word, Muslim perceptions notwithstanding: "From leading a global crusade against terrorism to signing into law two of the largest tax cuts in history," the letter reads, "[Bush] has provided strong, steady leadership during difficult times." Questioned by reporters, Racicot was unapologetic, claiming that the word need not denote a holy war. However, he then sounded something like a holy warrior himself, in offering the ecstatic statement that the letter's focus, and therefore Bush's goal, is "to protect the cause of freedom – not just for a moment, not for a day, not for ten years, but for a hundred years." Although he stopped short of "a thousand years," that millenarian utterance would have come as no surprise.
Apparently the U.S. military also is on board for Bush & Co.'s grand new drive against the Saracens. The spirit of crusade shines forth from the hearty countenance of Army Lieutenant General William G. "Jerry" Boykin, deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, who caused a momentary stir by giving talks, sometimes in his military uniform, at fundamentalist churches, where he would call America "a Christian nation," assert that Bush had been "appointed by God," and tell the rapt believers that our enemy in the "war on terrorism" is "a guy named Satan." Christians believe in "a real god," whereas the god of Islam is "an idol." He would also show the audience a photograph that he had taken in Somalia, clearly demonstrating "a demonic spirit over the city of Mogadishu." That Bush & Co. did not replace or even reprimand the general (who did not apologize, insisting, quite sincerely, that he was "not a zealot") stood out as mere further evidence of just how militant the regime's Christian doctrine really is.
Shortly after the invasion, U.S. troops stationed in Iraq received a booklet called "A Christian's Duty," adjuring them to pray for Bush and even mail the president a special tear-out form assuring him that, while dodging potshots and firing on civilians, they were praying for him. Meanwhile, the ravaged theater of the occupation has been overrun by Southern Baptist missionaries seeking to exploit Iraqi misery for Jesus' sake. Laden with clean blankets, bottled water, bread, and bandages – and countless Bibles – the Christian soldiers of the International Mission Board (IMB) use such material inducements to convert as many Muslims as they can, waging what their Web site calls a "war for souls":
[i]Southern Baptists must understand that there is a war for souls under way in Iraq... Even as Islamic leaders try to tighten their grip on the country and its people, cult groups like the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses are sending hundreds of their missionaries into Iraq to spread their pseudo-Christianity[/i].
Muslims have been horrified by such spiritual carpetbagging. "The Iraqi people are in a state of siege – they lack, food, water, everything – and to come to exploit it and to give it in the name of Jesus Christ the Lord is unacceptable," Ali Abu Zarkuk of the American Muslim Council told the BBC in April of 2003. "You will be perceived as either dying by the bullet or dying by the Bible through Muslim eyes." Eight months later, Islamic terrorists in Yemen bombed the Jibla Baptist Hospital, killing all three mission workers, and thereby inflicting "the worst tragedy in the 156-year history of the IMB," reported APB News in December 2003. The U.S. Christian presence has amounted to a dangerous provocation in Iraq, although our press has rarely mentioned it.
Bloody are the consequences also of the U.S. government's impossibly hard line on Israel – a partiality dictated less by well-connected Zionists inside the Pentagon than by the president's millennial co-religionists, who call the shots in this administration. On July 14, 2003, Condoleezza Rice met secretly with 40 "Christian Zionists," including Jerry Falwell, Gary Bauer, and Tom DeLay, to hear their views about a future Palestinian state. (They opposed it.) Such confabs are routine. In May 2004, a stray e-mail revealed that Elliott Abrams, the National Security Council's major expert on the Middle East, regularly holds long meetings with the Apostolic Congress, "the Christian Voice in the Nation's Capital." Asked why the Congress deems itself "the Christian Voice," rather than a Christian voice, Pentecostal minister Robert G. Upton answered, "There has been a real lack of leadership in having someone emerge as a Christian voice, someone who doesn't speak for the right, someone who doesn't speak for the left, but someone who speaks for the people, and someone who speaks from a theocratical perspective."
Thus prompted, Bush has given up all possibility of honest mediation, in favor of the Manichaean paradigm that dominates his consciousness and theirs: Israeli violence is good, and Palestinian violence is evil. This apolitical and antidiplomatic view is based entirely on the dictates of apocalyptic Christian eschatology: The Jews must stay in Israel so that a number of them (i.e., 144,000) can turn into Christians prior to Jesus' return. On the basis of Romans 9-11, Reconstructionist Greg Bahnsen prophecies the magical effect of Jewish mass conversion:
[i]When the world sees "all Israel" become saved (through Jewish longing for the saving blessing experienced by the Gentiles), there will be yet further and greater blessings from God upon the whole population of the world because Christ will then be internationally recognized and exalted among men[/i].
On July 30, 2003, Bush & Co. proclaimed the apocalyptic basis of its Israel policy by having Tom DeLay heat up the Knesset with a faith-based message of eternal nonconciliation:
[i]The war on terror is not a misunderstanding. It is not an opportunity for negotiation or dialogue. It's a battle between good and evil, between the Truth of liberty and the Lie of terror.
Freedom and terrorism will struggle – good and evil – until the battle is resolved. These are the terms Providence has put before the United States, Israel, and the rest of the civilized world. They are stark, and they are final.[/i]
That the White House would permit a congressman and Christian Reconstructionist – and, at foreign policy, a frothing amateur – to make so visible and partisan a public statement on and in the Middle East suggests that faith, not reason (and not Colin Powell), drives Bush/Cheney's foreign policy. And the result has been predictably disastrous: Israeli/Palestinian relations at their worst, the death toll at unprecedented levels, extremists on both sides resolved and popular among their own, and mounting worldwide hatred for the Jews.
Stateside, meanwhile, the theocrats continue to exert their wonder-working powers, as they have been doing ever since the president's first public act, which was to make John Ashcroft his attorney general. That step alone should have made clear to all that Bush was no "uniter" but averse to "reaching out," and, indeed, uninterested in solving any worldly problems, dedicated as he is to stealthily theocratizing this republic.
Thus the White House has an "Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives," while each of the Departments of Labor, Commerce, Health and Human Services, et al., boasts a departmental "Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives" – a grand administrative stroke that blurs the crucial line dividing church and state. This move has served both to legitimize the political activism of pro-Bush churches and denominations and to further propagate the view that social services should be performed not by the government but by religious groups, whose charity should take the place of federal programs. Although advertised as purely altruistic, and as an equal boon to the communities served by churches, synagogues, and mosques alike, this innovation is primarily intended to abet the proselytizing efforts of the Christian right, whose "armies of compassion" can now save souls under the auspices of Uncle Sam.
[b]Mark Crispin Mill | |
