Magnetic Ribbons

Dumbing Down Patriotism: It's so easy to be a patriot in Bush's America. It requires no real sacrifice - only the willingness to shell out $1.93 for a Chinesae made gegaw at Walmart.

Torture

That was then:


This is now:


"The U.N. said there is more torture going on now in Iraq than when Saddam was there. If we could only get torture back to the Saddam levels maybe that would be a victory."
--Bill Maher

Oversight

During WWII, when America was under attack, Harry S Truman gained fame and respect when his bipartisan committee (popularly known as the "Truman Committee") investigated the scandal of military wastefulness by exposing fraud and mismanagement. Although some feared the Committee would hurt war morale, it was considered a success and is reported to have saved at least $11 billion (in 1940s dollars).

Truman was a Democrat. So was the president. Still, he believed in Congressional oversight, and his president encouraged him. Both felt war profiteers to be no better than traitors.

Compare to this story:

Crucial Iraq police academy "a disaster"

By Amit R. Paley

The Washington Post

BAGHDAD, Iraq — A $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be partially demolished, federal investigators have found.

The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to U.S. efforts aimed at preparing Iraqis to take control of the country's security, was so poorly constructed that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks. Floors heaved inches off the ground and cracked apart. Water dripped so profusely in one room that it was dubbed "the rain forest."

"This is the most important civil security project in the country — and it's a failure," said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office created by Congress. "The Baghdad police academy is a disaster."

Bowen's office plans to release a 27-page report today detailing the most alarming problems with the facility.

Even in a $21 billion reconstruction effort that has been marred by cases of corruption and fraud, failures in training and housing Iraq's security forces are particularly significant because of their effect on what the U.S. military has called its primary mission here: to prepare Iraqi police and soldiers so that Americans can depart.

....The report serves as the latest indictment of Parsons Corp., an American construction giant that was awarded about $1 billion for reconstruction projects across Iraq. After chronicling previous Parsons failures to properly build health clinics, prisons and hospitals, Bowen said he now plans to audit every Parsons project.

"The truth needs to be told about what we didn't get for our dollar from Parsons," Bowen said.

.....Federal investigators who visited the academy last week expressed concerns about the buildings' structural integrity.

"They may have to demolish everything they built," said Robert DeShurley, a senior engineer with the inspector general.

Parson had several other contracts, on which they performed equally admirably.

As have so many of our no-bid contactors. Billions have gone missing, billions more have been wasted.

And there has been no oversight. NONE. The Congress would not dare to bite the hands of their masters.

But Mr. Cheney will get a big, fat diviend check from Halliburton, and his stock options' value soars, so all is good.

What Iraqis think

From CNN:

Seventy-one percent of Iraqis responding to a new survey favor a commitment by U.S.-led forces in Iraq to withdraw in a year.

The majority of respondents to the University of Maryland poll said that "they would like the Iraqi government to ask for U.S.-led forces to be withdrawn from Iraq within a year or less," according to the survey's summary.

"Given four options, 37 percent take the position that they would like U.S.-led forces withdrawn 'within six months,' while another 34 percent opt for 'gradually withdraw(ing) U.S.-led forces according to a one-year timeline.'

"Twenty percent favor a two-year timeline and just 9 percent favor 'only reduc(ing) U.S.-led forces as the security situation improves in Iraq.'"

The month's poll came in the midst of a turbulent year marked by increased Sunni-Shiite sectarian violence in Baghdad and elsewhere in the nation.

A U.S. commander said Wednesday that suicide attacks in Iraq are rising as the Islamic holy month of Ramadan gets under way.

Majority favor attacks on U.S.

The poll's summary also suggests that most Iraqis think the American presence is doing more harm than good.

"An overwhelming majority believes that the U.S. military presence in Iraq is provoking more conflict than it is preventing and there is growing confidence in the Iraqi army," the summary said. "If the U.S. made a commitment to withdraw, a majority believes that this would strengthen the Iraqi government.

"Support for attacks on U.S.-led forces has grown to a majority position -- now 6 in 10. Support appears to be related to a widespread perception, held by all ethnic groups, that the U.S. government plans to have permanent military bases in Iraq."

The WorldPublicOpinion.org poll was conducted September 1-4 by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. It was fielded by KA Research Ltd./D3 Systems Inc. Questions were asked of a nationwide representative sample of 1,150 Iraqi adults.

According to Yahoo:

The State Department, meanwhile, has also conducted its own poll, something it does periodically, spokesman Sean McCormack said. The State Department poll found that two-thirds of Iraqis in Baghdad favor an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces, according to The Washington Post. McCormack declined to discuss details of the department's Iraq poll.

SO why are we still there?

The Myth of White Supremacy....Shattered

......once and for all!

What You Get for $2 Billion a Week

From the Mahablog:

The Boston Globe reports that our little adventure in Iraq is costing us U.S. taxpayers $2 billion every week.

By some coincidence, $2 billion just about what Senator Hillary Clinton is seeking in total to cover health care for 9/11 Ground Zero workers.

Guess which one actually gets funded......

NIE

Bush was forced to release a summary of the National Intelligence Estimate, a report put together by all 16 US Intelligence agencies. It was written in February of '06, but had been kept under wraps. Based on what came out, it's easy to understand why.

The Conclusion: The War in Iraq has not made us safer; it has increased terrorism, rather than decreasing it.



And this is in the part that Bush declassified. One wonders what's in the redacted parts, or in the more recent NIE report on Iraq that Bush doesn't want to release until February.

Bush had the audacity to question the motives of those who had leaked parts of the report "just before the election." What about those who keep information hidden until just after the election?

Who better serves democracy?

Commas

On Sunday CNN aired a portion of an interview with President Bush conducted by Wolf Blitzer earlier in the week. Blitzer asked about the latest setbacks in Iraq and indications that civil war may be at hand.

BLITZER: Let's move on and talk a little bit about Iraq. Because this is a huge, huge issue, as you know, for the American public, a lot of concern that perhaps they are on the verge of a civil war, if not already a civil war…. We see these horrible bodies showing up, tortured, mutilation. The Shia and the Sunni, the Iranians apparently having a negative role. Of course, al Qaeda in Iraq is still operating.

Bush, with a slight smile, replied,

BUSH: Yes, you see — you see it on TV, and that's the power of an enemy that is willing to kill innocent people. But there's also an unbelievable will and resiliency by the Iraqi people…. Admittedly, it seems like a decade ago. I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma because there is — my point is, there's a strong will for democracy. (emphasis added)

We're all just commas to the boy king. 2700 dead American servicemen. 20,000+ seriously injured. And 100,000+ dead Iraqi civilians.

Commas.

Democracy

"Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried."
~ Winston Churchill

Then again.......

Rogue Nation

The so-called "compromise" reached by the "dissident" Republican senators with the administration is a complete capitulation and an abomination.

Today's New York Times calls it a "Bad Bargain:

Here is a way to measure how seriously President Bush was willing to compromise on the military tribunals bill: Less than an hour after an agreement was announced yesterday with three leading Republican senators, the White House was already laying a path to wiggle out of its one real concession.

About the only thing that Senators John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham had to show for their defiance was Mr. Bush’s agreement to drop his insistence on allowing prosecutors of suspected terrorists to introduce classified evidence kept secret from the defendant. The White House agreed to abide by the rules of courts-martial, which bar secret evidence. (Although the administration’s supporters continually claim this means giving classified information to terrorists, the rules actually provide for reviewing, editing and summarizing classified material. Evidence that cannot be safely declassified cannot be introduced.)

This is a critical point. As Senator Graham keeps noting, the United States would never stand for any other country’s convicting an American citizen with undisclosed, secret evidence. So it seemed like a significant concession — until Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, briefed reporters yesterday evening. He said that while the White House wants to honor this deal, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Duncan Hunter, still wants to permit secret evidence and should certainly have his say. To accept this spin requires believing that Mr. Hunter, who railroaded Mr. Bush’s original bill through his committee, is going to take any action not blessed by the White House.


On other issues, the three rebel senators achieved only modest improvements on the White House’s original positions. They wanted to bar evidence obtained through coercion. Now, they have agreed to allow it if a judge finds it reliable (which coerced evidence hardly can be) and relevant to guilt or innocence. The way coercion is measured in the bill, even those protections would not apply to the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.

The deal does next to nothing to stop the president from reinterpreting the Geneva Conventions. While the White House agreed to a list of “grave breaches” of the conventions that could be prosecuted as war crimes, it stipulated that the president could decide on his own what actions might be a lesser breach of the Geneva Conventions and what interrogation techniques he considered permissible. It’s not clear how much the public will ultimately learn about those decisions. They will be contained in an executive order that is supposed to be made public, but Mr. Hadley reiterated that specific interrogation techniques will remain secret.

Even before the compromises began to emerge, the overall bill prepared by the three senators had fatal flaws. It allows the president to declare any foreigner, anywhere, an “illegal enemy combatant” using a dangerously broad definition, and detain him without any trial. It not only fails to deal with the fact that many of the Guantánamo detainees are not terrorists and will never be charged, but it also chokes off any judicial review.

The Democrats have largely stood silent and allowed the trio of Republicans to do the lifting. It’s time for them to either try to fix this bill or delay it until after the election. The American people expect their leaders to clean up this mess without endangering U.S. troops, eviscerating American standards of justice, or further harming the nation’s severely damaged reputation.

Additionally,it is retroactive, thus giving the president and his merry band of torturers immunity from prosecution under American law.

How convenient!

Darfur

500,000 dead and counting.

Any day now, the Leader of the Free World will act to stop this atrocity.....

Worse than Saddam

Bush wants to change the Geneva conventions to allow limited forms of torture.

Meanwhile, back in Iraq:

(Reuters) - Torture is rampant in Iraqi prisons and police detention centers, and may be worse than under Saddam Hussein's rule, a U.N. human rights investigator said on Thursday.

"The situation as far as torture is concerned in Iraq is now completely out of hand," Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture and cruelty, told reporters in Geneva.

"The situation is so bad that many people say that it is worse than in the times of Saddam Hussein," he said.

Iraq: the torture prisons are not closed, they're just under new management. But then, until the first Gulf War, Saddam was our ally.

Great minds think - and act - alike.

6,599

According to the AP:

The number of Iraqi civilians killed in July and August hit 6,599, a record-high number that is far greater than initial estimates suggested, the United Nations said Wednesday.

That raises new questions about U.S. and Iraqi forces' ability to bring peace to Baghdad, where the bulk of the violent deaths occurred. Iraq's government, set up in 2006, is "currently facing a generalized breakdown of law and order which presents a serious challenge to the institutions of Iraq," it said.

According to the U.N., which releases the figures every two months, violent civilian deaths in July reached an unprecedented high of 3,590, an average of more than 100 a day. The August toll was 3,009, the report said.

The lower August number may have been the result of a security crackdown in Baghdad, though it was partly offset by a rise in attacks elsewhere, including in the northern city of Mosul.

Of the total for July and August, the report said 5,106 of the dead were from Baghdad.

..."These figures reflect the fact that indiscriminate killings of civilians have continued throughout the country while hundreds of bodies appear bearing signs of severe torture and execution style killing," the report said. "Such murders are carried out by death squads or by armed groups, with sectarian or revenge connotations."

But:

The U.N. investigators who compiled the report said it was likely that even those numbers were low. In July, for example, the Health Ministry reported no people killed in Anbar, the chaotic province that includes the extremely violent cities of Ramadi and Fallujah.

Also, the Medico-Legal Institute's number of 1,536 was the same as the number of violent deaths in Baghdad reported by the Iraqi Health Ministry earlier this month.

The U.S. military had initially claimed a drastic drop in the death toll for August, but the estimate was revised upward after the United States revealed it had not counted people killed by bombs, mortars, rockets or other mass attacks.

If you don't like the numbers, just change the way you count! Sadly:

The report said torture was a major concern in Iraq and the bodies showed significant evidence of it.

"Bodies found at the Medico-legal Institute often bear signs of severe torture including acid-induced injuries and burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin, broken bones (back, hands and legs), missing eyes, missing teeth and wounds caused by power drills or nails," the report said.

Certainly, there must be some good news?

The report from the U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq's Human Rights office highlighted the sectarian crisis gripping the country, offering a grim assessment across a range of indicators — worrying evidence of torture, unlawful detentions, growth of sectarian militias and death squads, and a rise in "honor killings" of women.
.....It said about 300,000 people had been displaced in Iraq since the bombing of a shrine in Samarra in February.

The U.N. has also received several reports of Iraqi journalists facing prosecution for their reporting. In one case, for example, three reporters working for a newspaper faced trial for articles criticizing a regional government and accusing police and the judicial system there of violating basic human rights.

The report said more than 35,000 Iraqis were under detention, including 13,571 by multinational forces. That represents a 28 percent increase over the number at the end of June, it said.

The U.N. special rapporteur has received allegations of torture in prisons run by Iraq's interior and defense ministries, as well as ones under multinational control.

Can something be done?

Iraqi non-governmental organizations "expressed their frustration at the current situation and stressed the urgent need for the U.N. and other international entities to intervene in order to prevent further human rights violations," the report said.

However, the U.N. special rapporteur for torture, Manfred Nowak, has so far been unable to go to Iraq because the government has not provided him the necessary invitation, it said.

Damn that liberal media!

Eemy, Meenie, Miney, Moe......

To reiterate:
No wonder the reconstruction is going so well!

It's Deja Vu All Over Again.....

I saw this a few days ago:

In an echo of the intelligence wars that preceded the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a high-stakes struggle is brewing within the Bush administration and in Congress over Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program and involvement in terrorism.

U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials say Bush political appointees and hard-liners on Capitol Hill have tried recently to portray Iran's nuclear program as more advanced than it is and to exaggerate Tehran's role in Hezbollah's attack on Israel in mid-July.

The struggle's outcome could have profound implications for U.S. policy.

President Bush, who addresses the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, has said he prefers diplomacy to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, but he hasn't ruled out using military force.

Several former U.S. defense officials who maintain close ties to the Pentagon say they've been told that plans for airstrikes - if Bush deems them necessary - are being updated.

The leader of a Persian Gulf country who visited Washington recently came away without receiving assurances he sought that the military option was off the table, said a person with direct knowledge of the meetings.

"It seems like Iran is becoming the new Iraq," said one U.S. counterterrorism official.

Read the rest here. And then weep.

It's Unacceptable to Think.....

So said Bush on Friday, in response to a question about a disagreement Colin Powell had with him about the Geneva Conventions. Bush truly believes his way is the only way, and has no compunction telling someone that it's UNACCEPTABLE to think.

I never thought that, in my lifetime, I would ever see the following headline in an American newspaper:

A Defining Moment for America
The president goes to Capitol Hill to lobby for torture.

Read there editorial here. They've said what I want to say, but so much better:

PRESIDENT BUSH rarely visits Congress. So it was a measure of his painfully skewed priorities that Mr. Bush made the unaccustomed trip yesterday to seek legislative permission for the CIA to make people disappear into secret prisons and have information extracted from them by means he dare not describe publicly.

Of course, Mr. Bush didn't come out and say he's lobbying for torture. Instead he refers to "an alternative set of procedures" for interrogation. But the administration no longer conceals what it wants. It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won't have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and "waterboarding," or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.

And watch Olbermann's take on Bush's attempt to legitimize torture:



Transcription of the intersting part:

Olbermann: … is he [Bush] covering his own backside with this?

Turley: Quite frankly, I think that there is evidence to say he is. You know, the thing that is ticking here in terms of a clock, is the fact that these fourteen guys that were recently transferred, just arrived not that long ago in Gitmo, in Cuba. They are going to be or have been interviewed by the Red Cross. Most people believe that they will reveal that they were subject to waterboarding, where you are held under water until you think that you are going to drown. That is undeniably torture under the international standards. If that occurs in the coming days, the United States and specifically the President will be accused of committing a very serious violation of international law. Torture is one of the top three or four things that the international law is designed to prevent. And so the reason there is this move to try to get legislation as fast as possible is because I think I think this administration senses that there is a lot of trouble coming down this mountain.

This explains a lot.......

Mission Not Accomplished

One of the reasons given for going into Iraq was to set up a successful democracy and thus provide a model for other Mideastern countries. A sort of Neocon Domino Theory.

One would think, then, that, after the fall of Baghdad, we would have sent in our best and brightest to accomplish our task. Right?

Lots of people wanted to go and help, to be part of the reconstruction of Iraq – restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers, according to the Washington Post, wanted to go.

So how did the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) select who would take part in their grand undertaking? I appears, as with all things Bushonian, politics was the main prerequisite:

But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O'Beirne's office in the Pentagon. To pass muster with O'Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.

O'Beirne's staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade.

And who was chosen?

Many of those chosen by O'Beirne's office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq's government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance – but had applied for a White House job – was sent to reopen Baghdad's stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget, even though they didn't have a background in accounting.

Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation that sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people, according to many people who participated in the reconstruction effort.

What were the powers of the CPA?

The CPA had the power to enact laws, print currency, collect taxes, deploy police and spend Iraq's oil revenue.

....Endowed with $18 billion in U.S. reconstruction funds and a comparatively quiescent environment in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion, the CPA was the U.S. government's first and best hope to resuscitate Iraq – to establish order, promote rebuilding and assemble a viable government, all of which, experts believe, would have constricted the insurgency and mitigated the chances of civil war. Many of the basic tasks Americans struggle to accomplish today in Iraq – training the army, vetting the police, increasing electricity generation – could have been performed far more effectively in 2003 by the CPA.

Had we accomplished those goals – training the army, vetting the police, increasing electricity generation – we might have nipped the insurrection in the bud. Had we created a functioning society, instead of chasing a Neocon wet dream of Capitalism Unleashed, we might have stability and success in Iraq, instead of a civil war between fundamentalist militias.

And what did these young Neocons with political connections do in Iraq?

...[M]any CPA staff members were more interested in other things: in instituting a flat tax, in selling off government assets, in ending food rations and otherwise fashioning a new nation that looked a lot like the United States. Many of them spent their days cloistered in the Green Zone, a walled-off enclave in central Baghdad with towering palms, posh villas, well-stocked bars and resort-size swimming pools.


By the time Bremer departed, Iraq was in a precarious state. The Iraqi army, which had been dissolved and reconstituted by the CPA, was one-third the size he had pledged it would be. Seventy percent of police officers had not been screened or trained. Electricity generation was far below what Bremer had promised to achieve. And Iraq's interim government had been selected not by elections but by Americans. Divisive issues were to be resolved later on, increasing the chances that tension over those matters would fuel civil strife.

Civil strife? You mean, like this:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi police have found the bodies of 47 more death squad victims in Baghdad, the latest in a wave of sectarian killings which prompted the United States to divert troops from other parts of Iraq to the embattled capital.

The bodies were found early Saturday. Most victims had been bound, tortured and shot, bringing the toll from such killings to nearly 180 in four days.

Heckuva job.....as always. Brownie would be proud.

American Values

When did torture become an American value?

The Bush administration (and their hard-core supporters in Congress) are pushing for a law to redefine the Geneva Convention, an international treaty the USA is a signatory to. They wish to change the definition of what, exactly, constitutes torture, and to legitimize Bush's "military tribunals," secret courts* outside the purview of the American judicial system.

Why? They claim that Article 3 is too vague and non-specific. Alberto Gonzales, our Attorney General, thinks the entire Geneva Convention is "quaint."

Here is Article 3, reproduced in its entirety:

In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:

1. Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.

To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:

(a) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

(b) Taking of hostages;

(c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;

(d) The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

2. The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.

An impartial humanitarian body, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, may offer its services to the Parties to the conflict.

The Parties to the conflict should further endeavour to bring into force, by means of special agreements, all or part of the other provisions of the present Convention.

The application of the preceding provisions shall not affect the legal status of the Parties to the conflict.

It seems pretty straightforward to me.

This convention has been in place since 1947. It resulted, among other thing, from the cruelties imposed on Allied POWs during WWII.

Our guys.

We were the good guys once.

And now we're taking the side of Mengele and his ilk? Redefining torture, as our AG did, to include ONLY acts which cause "organ failure, (permanent) impairment of bodily function, or even death?"

Who could possibly think that this would be allowed under the Geneva Convention:


Or this:


Horrible as it was, Abu Ghraib was just the public side, the one we've managed to catch a glimpse of.

No one knows what went on in the SECRET prisons that Bush has only recently admitted exist.

Why would the Bush administration want to redefine torture? Is it to give clear guidelines to torturers..........or a CYA move, an attempt to legitimize past actions and meant to avoid future trips to the Hague?



_______
* These courts would be able to use secret evidence which the defendant would not be allowed to see, and would be able to execute people based on such evidence. This directly contravenes our constitution–which is, it appears, is just another quaint old document.

Victory!

George W. Bush truly is a great president! Apparently, we have won the war against pollution, environmental degradation, species extinction, and global warming! I mean, why ELSE would he be shutting down the EPA?

After all, Ice core records from Antarctica show the current levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are higher now than at any time in the past 800,000 years and increasing at an unprecedented rate. That's a good thing, yes?


Or maybe we're just winning the war against the environment?

Fair and Balanced?

No, that would be Fox.

NBC, the supposedly more liberal network, showed its true stripes last night. From TPM we learn:

Brian Williams opened his newscast last night with this: "Good evening from Havana, Cuba, the host city for what is called the Summit of Non-Aligned Nations--in short, all of the enemies of the United States, really, gathered in one room."

Hmmmmm. That's an awful lot of flags. How many nations are we talking about, anyway? Well, according to Wikipedia,

The Non-Aligned Movement, or NAM, is an international organization of over 100 states which consider themselves not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc...They represent nearly two-thirds of the United Nations's members and comprise 55% of the world population.

And, according to a recent BBC article, NAM now has 118 members, accounting for about two-thirds of the world's population,

Damn, it's going to be hard to invade them ALL!

We may need to bring back the draft. But it should be a Republican draft, starting with Jenna and Barbara, the College and/or Young Republicans, and any healthy heterosexuals between the ages of 18 and 41 who voted for Bush/Cheney.
After all, it's for the the greater (corporate) good, no?

Tricky Dick

Dick DeVos (R-Amway) is finally slipping in the polls, as Michigan voters seem to be coming to their senses. They've decided that someone who shipped jobs overseas as a businessman is probably not the best person to manage Michigan's hemorrhaging economy.

And then there's his "secret plan" to save the economy. Shades of Nixon! Another Tricky Dick.

This first videos damns Dick with his own word and actions:



This second one is cute but to the point--any child can see that Dick is bad news:



Ganholm's campaign has come up with a good ad, "Who's the Real Jobs Maker?"; you can view it here.

WPE

I have a WPE bumper sticker on my Jeep. It gets a lot of comments, generally good. These folks have done even better – what a great vacation photo!



You can order your own sticker or T-shirt from Bart at Bartcop.com

Spread the word!

Baghdad Dick

"Everything is going well in Iraq." "We're winning!" "Saddam had ties to al Quaeda." "If we had it to do over, we would still invade Iraq."

In his book Candide, Voltaire has his lead character pronounce "All is for the best...in the best of all possible worlds," despite all evidence to the contrary.

Cheney apparently agrees.

The Path to 9-11

According to Clarence Swinney, Political Historian, ABC's "The Path to 9-11" was just a little bit inaccurate. Just for the record, under Richard Clarke's leadership as Czar of Counterterrorism:.

· CLINTON developed the nation's first anti-terrorism policy,
and appointed first national coordinator of anti-terrorist efforts.

· Bill Clinton stopped cold the Al Qaeda millennium hijacking and bombing plots.

· Bill Clinton stopped cold a planned attack to kill the Pope.

· Bill Clinton stopped cold a planned attack to blow up 12 U.S. jetliners simultaneously.

· Bill Clinton stopped cold a planned attack to blow up UN Headquarters.

· Bill Clinton stopped cold a planned attack to blow up FBI Headquarters.

· Bill Clinton stopped cold a planned attack to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

· Bill Clinton stopped cold a planned attack to blow up Boston airport.

· Bill Clinton stopped cold a planned attack to blow up Lincoln and Holland Tunnels in NY.

· Bill Clinton stopped cold a planned attack to blow up the George Washington Bridge.

· Bill Clinton stopped cold a planned attack to blow up the US Embassy in Albania.

· Bill Clinton tried to kill Osama bin Laden and disrupt Al Qaeda through preemptive strikes (efforts denounced by the G.O.P.).

· Bill Clinton brought perpetrators of first World Trade Center bombing and CIA killings to justice.

· Bill Clinton did not blame the Bush I administration for first WTC bombing even though it occurred 38 days after Bush left office. Instead, worked hard, even obsessively - and successfully - to stop future terrorist attacks.

· Bill Clinton named the Hart-Rudman commission to report on nature of terrorist threats and major steps to be taken to combat terrorism.

· Bill Clinton sent legislation to Congress to tighten airport security. (Remember, this is before 911) The legislation was defeated by the Republicans because of opposition from the airlines.

· Bill Clinton sent legislation to Congress to allow for better tracking of terrorist funding. It was defeated by Republicans in the Senate because of opposition from banking interests.

· Bill Clinton sent legislation to Congress to add tagents to explosives, to allow for better tracking of explosives used by terrorists. It was defeated by the Republicans because of opposition from the NRA.

· Bill Clinton increased the military budget by an average of 14 per cent, reversing the trend under Bush I.

· Bill Clinton tripled the budget of the FBI for counterterrorism and doubled overall funding for counterterrorism.

· Bill Clinton detected and destroyed cells of Al Qaeda in over 20 countries.

· Bill Clinton created national stockpile of drugs and vaccines including 40 million doses of smallpox vaccine.

· Of Clinton's efforts says Robert Oakley, Reagan Ambassador for Counterterrorism: "Overall, I give them very high marks" and "The only major criticism I have is the obsession with Osama".

· Paul Bremer, current Civilian Administrator of Iraq disagrees slightly with Robert Oakley as he believed the Bill Clinton Administration had "correctly focused on bin Laden.

· Barton Gellman in the Washington Post put it best, "By any measure available, Bill Clinton left office having given greater priority to terrorism than any president before him" and was the "first administration to undertake a systematic anti-terrorist effort".

Bush? Think Star Wars (missile defense) and Iraq. Always Iraq.

So who's responsible for 9-11?

(With thakns to bartcop.com, from whom I cribbed almost the entire thing)

Olberman: Five Years Later

9-11-01

The Emperor Has No Clothes

From Philly blogger Attytood:

George W. Bush is a man on a mission today: To remind the American people how they felt five years ago, when the public was understandably frightened by the killing of nearly 3,000 fellow citizens, and when the president briefly gained acceptance as a bullhorn-wielding leader.

Of course, the truth was anything but. Even on Day One, some of us -- too gently, in hindsight -- wondered about Bush's strange behavior on the actual 9/11, flying from remote airbase to remote airbase while Dick Cheney was running the show. Quickly, it because clear that any doubts about our commander-in-chief were flat-out forbidden. At least two journalists were fired for writing such stories. For example:

Tom Gutting, city editor for the Texas City Sun was fired in September 2001 after writing a column in which referred to President Bush as a "scared child seeking refuge in his mother's bed after having a nightmare" for not returning to Washington DC immediately after hearing about the attacks on September 11th.

The tone was set at the very top, when White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said famously that "[t]here are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and that this is not a time for remarks like that. It never is..."

Remarkably, most of the mainstream media obeyed. On the second anniversary of 9/11, in 2003, I wrote a story in the Daily News that, among other things, mentioned that Bush had spent at least five minutes reading "The Pet Goat" in that Sarasota classroom. It was an indisputable fact, and yet I received hundreds of emails from readers, many asking if I would be fired for reporting such a simple and inconvenient truth. When Michael Moore showed the actual footage in "Farhrenheit 911" months later, much of the nation was shocked to learn for the first time what really happened that day.

Not everyone was so surprised. In fact, the then-second graders that Bush read "The Pet Goat" to that morning clearly saw though the emperor's new clothes even while all the "grown-up" journalists did not. They realized that the ongoing attack had scared the living daylights out of their commander-in-chief: Here's what they say five years later:

SARASOTA, Fla. (AP) - Tyler Radkey and other second-graders at Emma E. Booker Elementary School didn't know what to think when an aide leaned in and whispered something to President Bush on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

"His face just started to turn red," said Tyler, now 13 and in seventh grade. "I thought, personally, he had to go to the bathroom."

For a puzzling seven minutes, the youngsters read aloud from the story "The Pet Goat" while the shaken president followed along in front of the class, trying to come to grips with what he had been told - that a second plane had just hit the World Trade Center and the nation was under terrorist attack.

"He looked like he was going to cry," said Natalia Jones-Pinkney, now 12.

It's true what they say...from the mouths of babes. In fact, check out this stunning footnote:

Suddenly, the morning returned to the script. [then-Education Secretary] Paige spoke to the stunned room of the importance of reading.

"It was so surreal," Sarasota schools spokeswoman Sheila Weiss said. "Everyone in there wanted to get out and find out what was going on, but we couldn't leave."

Tonight, on national TV, and again and again in the coming weeks, Bush and Karl Rove and their minions will try to remind you about Bush's "leadership" on Sept. 11, 2001. When they do, just remember what the little children saw that morning.

The emperor had no clothes.

The Real Heroes

On September 11, 2001, a film crew was following members of the FDNY on their runs. They ended up being involved with and filming the WTC attacks. CBS showed that footage as part of documentary last night.


It was brilliant.

The American Family Association boycotted this program because it had a few dirty words in it. Imagine – as people died falling from the towers, as the WTC buildings imploded and thousands died, and as their fellow firemen died in front of them, a few firefighters had the temerity to curse.



As GWB hid in classrooms and then jetted around the USA, running in fear, they were the true heroes.



Watch this tribute to see the real heroes of 9-11.

Where was George?

New York City, September 11, 2001 at 8:46 a.m



New York City, September 11, 2001 at 9:02:59 a.m.



Sarasota, FL, September 11, 2001 at 9:06 a.m



Sarasota, FL, September 11, 2001 at 9:15



The Timeline: Where George was on September 11, 2001.