OIL INDUSTRY
Oil refinery building boom abroad - not in U.S.
By Kevin G. Hall
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - With gasoline prices averaging $3.22 for a gallon of regular nationwide over the Memorial Day weekend, traditional economic logic might suggest that this would be a good time to invest in new U.S. oil refineries and increase the supply of gasoline.
Yet no new refinery has been built in the United States in three decades, only one is in the works and oil companies are scaling back planned investments in new, expanded or modernized U.S. refineries rather than increasing them.
Overseas, however - where it's generally cheaper, faster and easier to build oil refineries - a boom in construction is under way to meet the growing demand for gasoline in the United States and in big developing countries such as China and India. That means that Americans increasingly will be filling their tanks with imported gasoline.
In 2005, imported liquid fuels - mostly oil and an increasing amount of gasoline - accounted for about 60 percent of U.S. consumption, according to the Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the Energy Department. In a long-term assessment this month, the EIA said that figure could grow to 67 percent by 2030.
"We are outsourcing refining," said Severin Borenstein, an economist and energy expert at the University of California in Berkeley. "I think that this is primarily because of community resistance ... people don't want to live by refineries, but they still want the gasoline."
Refineries are being built in Saudi Arabia, India and China. For Saudi Arabia, the world's leading oil producer, tight refining capacity amounts to a brake on its oil sales.
India and other developing nations are building refineries to serve both their growing domestic markets and the increasing demand for gasoline in China, which by 2020 may have as many cars as the United States does.
In 1970, global refining capacity was about 47 million barrels per day. Today it's about 83.5 million barrels per day, but only 17.5 million of them are refined in the United States. The Paris-based International Energy Agency projected last year that the world's refining capacity will have to grow to 93 million barrels per day in 2010 and to 118 million by 2030 to meet demand.
The growth of global refining capacity will determine whether gasoline prices moderate, stay high or rise even higher. Many energy experts think that crude oil may be more available by 2010, but more barrels of oil won't help reduce prices unless there's more refining capacity to turn it into gasoline.
Congress passed legislation in 2005 to streamline the permitting process, hoping to encourage new investment in U.S. refineries. President Bush offered military bases to house them. Yet only one new U.S. refinery is planned, in Arizona, and it's been in the works for a decade.
"There are just a vast number of barriers for a start-up oil refinery in the United States," said Ian Calkins, a spokesman for the Arizona Clean Fuels Yuma project, which has faced environmental and community hurdles and now a lawsuit over former American Indians tribal lands.
The $3.5 billion refinery, planned for 100 miles southwest of Phoenix, would process a modest 150,000 barrels of oil per day when it comes online in 2011. Still, investors who're willing to plunk billions into a project that offers only long-term returns must be found.
"It's almost a non-starter to the vast majority of investors," Calkins said.
The cost of meeting state and federal regulations also drives refinery expansion overseas. The American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for the oil industry, said its members had spent $50 billion over the past decade to comply with environmental, safety and other regulations - about the cost of building 10 big refineries.
"Environmental regulations ... play a large role in restricting the development of new refining capacity and the loss of some existing capacity," said Robert Dauffenbach, an economist and associate dean of the University of Oklahoma's Price College of Business.
President Bush's goal of a 20 percent reduction in gasoline use by 2020 also has U.S. refiners scaling back investment plans from $1.8 billion over the next five years to about $1 billion.
"Should I make billions of dollars in new investments that are going to be stranded 10 years down the road?" asked Bill Holbrook, a spokesman for the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association.
_______________________________________
Hershey plant to kiss Oakdale goodbye
Globalization hits Oakdale, Calif., as Hershey moves its factory to Mexico. Protesters ask, 'Who's next?'
By Steve Chawkins, Times Staff WriterMay 31, 2007
OAKDALE, CALIF. — Hershey Co. — Oakdale's biggest employer and the nation's biggest candy company — announced its plan to close its sprawling plant, eliminate all 575 jobs and open a new factory in Monterrey, Mexico . Out on the street, to frequent, approving honks from motorists, protesters waved signs denouncing the company whose philanthropic, long-dead founder is still reverently referred to by some local employees as Mr. Hershey. One man wore a T-shirt that said on the front: "Where did 'the great American candy bar' go?" Asked for the answer, he whirled around to display the back: "Mexico!"For Hershey workers in Oakdale, globalization is no longer just an abstraction. Like legions of other Americans, they suddenly face questions as immediate as how to make a living and as far-reaching as whether their 20th century manufacturing skills will count for much anywhere else. Production at the plant is to be phased out by the end of the year.When she heard the news, Mabel McNaught, a school custodian, wondered how her family would recover. Her husband, Philip, 50, is a forklift driver at the plant, and she figures that finding another job nearby with similar pay and benefits won't be easy."I was devastated," she said. "I just started crying."The sign she held as traffic snaked past the protest was cautionary: "Who's next?"The 113-year-old company has described the plant shutdown as part of a "global supply-chain transformation." Some 3,000 of Hershey's 13,000 workers will lose their jobs, including as many as 900 in the company's hometown of Hershey, Pa., where the streetlights are shaped like Kisses. By 2010, Hershey says, the moves will save shareholders as much as $190 million annually."The financials are compelling," Chief Executive Richard H. Lenny told a meeting of market analysts in February, saying labor costs in Mexico are 10% of those in the United States. Asked about the negative publicity that would come with the plant closures, he said the decisions were "gut-wrenchingly difficult — but in the best interests of the business."In a picturesque region dotted with dairy farms and almond groves, Hershey has been an Oakdale fixture since 1965. Over the years, the plant on the edge of town has churned out nut-studded chocolate bars and uncounted millions of chocolate Kisses."It has to come down to greed," Melgoza said. "I mean, Hershey's has it made, coast to coast, right?"Not quite, according to industry observers. Earlier this month, the company lowered its projected 2007 earnings, citing high dairy prices. And, like other domestic candy companies, Hershey complains about government agricultural supports keeping the price of sugar at least double the level in foreign markets."The candy business has been laboring under this burden for a number of years," said Ray Jones, a director at Dechert-Hampe, a marketing consultant specializing in candy and confections.In addition, Hershey has old plants that are tough to overhaul — "inefficient legacy infrastructure," in the words of Lenny, the chief executive. And it sees lucrative markets in places like China, where it has introduced green tea-flavored Kisses, and in Mexico, where it plans to feature "locally relevant nut flavors" in its Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. None of that is good news for Oakdale, Jones said. "Do you invest in revamping U.S. plants when you're faced with higher sugar prices, higher labor costs and a more global business? It's not a new story, but whenever it repeats itself, it's tragic." Tom Baker, a 34-year employee who signed on at Hershey when he was 20, agreed."Now you're a commodity," he said. "Milton Hershey's ideal was stability for families, but there's none of that anymore. There's no more moral connection between business and working-class America. And in Hershey, Pa., the granddaughter of H.B. Reese, creator of the Peanut Butter Cup, vowed that no Hershey's product, including the one named for her grandfather, would pass her lips again."Mr. Hershey was a warm, wonderful man who wanted his business to stay in America," Rosie Rippon-Prete said in an interview.Unemployed Hershey workers may find jobs, but few at wages comparable to their average of $16.81 an hour, officials said. Unemployment hovers at more than 9% in the Central Valley, compared with 4.8% statewide. Some local residents even endure a three-hour commute to jobs in the Bay area.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Politics of Fear
The politcs of fear: when fear comes in reasoning goes out.
We spend a lot of time decrying hack journalism, but let me highlight some of the good work being done. Here is Peter Canellos of the Globe truthsquadding the GOP Presidential candidates:
-- In defending the Iraq war, leading Republican presidential contenders are increasingly echoing words and phrases used by President Bush in the run-up to the war that reinforce the misleading impression that Iraq was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
. . . Senator John McCain . . . suggested that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden would "follow us home" from Iraq -- a comment some viewers may have taken to mean that bin Laden was in Iraq, which he is not.
Former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani asserted, in response to a question about Iraq, that "these people want to follow us here and they have followed us here. Fort Dix happened a week ago. " However, none of the six people arrested for allegedly plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey were from Iraq.
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney . . . said [terroristgroups] have "come together" to try to bring down the United States, though specialists say few of the groups Romney cited have worked together and only some have threatened the United States.
_____________________________________
LETTER FROM WASHINGTON
Democrats in Washington want to keep impeachment off the table
By Steven Thomma
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - The push to impeach President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney is gaining a hearing in some parts of the country, but not in Washington.
More than 70 cities and 14 state Democratic parties have urged impeachment or investigations that could lead to impeachment. The most common charge is that Bush manipulated intelligence to lead the country into the Iraq war. Other charges include spying on Americans and torturing suspected terrorists in violation of U.S. and international law.
Most recently, the Massachusetts Democratic Party voted to push impeachment of both men. The 2,500 state convention delegates voted almost unanimously against Cheney; the vote against Bush was closer.
Massachusetts' Democratic Party thus joined 13 others on the investigate-or-impeach bandwagon, including: Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.
Among the cities and towns, the largest and most recent is Detroit, where the city council voted 7-0 this month to urge Congress to impeach Bush and Cheney for "intentionally misleading Congress and the public regarding the threat from Iraq in order to justify the war."
"There's a lot growing in support," said Tim Carpenter, the director of the liberal group Progressive Democrats of America. "Whether Congress will respond, that's another question."
Indeed. The Democrats who run Congress have no interest in impeaching Bush or Cheney, despite pressure from their party's base outside the Beltway.
It's noteworthy that impeachment pressure is coming from the home states of the two Democratic leaders in Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.
Pelosi said last year that impeachment "is off the table." Under the Constitution, the House impeaches; the Senate then decides whether to convict and remove from office.
It's also interesting that one of the resolutions came from Detroit, home to Rep. John Conyers, who as the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee would lead any impeachment hearings.
The Detroit resolution was co-authored by Monica Conyers, the congressman's wife. But she hasn't had any noticeable clout at home: Conyers said last year that he wasn't interested in impeachment - just oversight investigations - and he hasn't changed his stand.
There are both policy and political reasons that Democratic leaders are risking the anger of their base.
One is that some don't see an impeachable offense in what Bush has done, what the Constitution calls "high crimes and misdemeanors." They might find such evidence in any of the many congressional investigations, but they haven't yet.
Another is that they fear a political backlash from voters similar to the one that punished Republicans after they impeached Bill Clinton. One factor on the side of the pro-impeachment crowd: Clinton was much more popular than Bush.
The third is that they're eager to keep Bush and Cheney around as punching bags for Democratic candidates in the 2008 campaign.
"The political lens they're looking through is the 2008 election," Carpenter said. "They want to see Bush and Cheney dangling so the election is a referendum on them. That is not the correct lens."
To him, the right lens is the last election, when voters threw the Republicans out of power in Congress. Those people, he said, now want Bush and Cheney out.
"There is a groundswell here," Carpenter said. "Pelosi says it's off the table. It's our role to put it on the table."
_______________________________________
NASA: Danger Point Closer Than Thought From Warming
'Disastrous Effects' of Global Warming Tipping Points Near, According to New Study
By BILL BLAKEMOREMay 29, 2007
Even "moderate additional" greenhouse emissions are likely to push Earth past "critical tipping points" with "dangerous consequences for the planet," according to research conducted by NASA and the Columbia University Earth Institute.
With just 10 more years of "business as usual" emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas, says the NASA/Columbia paper, "it becomes impractical" to avoid "disastrous effects."
The study appears in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Its lead author is James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
The forecast effects include "increasingly rapid sea-level rise, increased frequency of droughts and floods, and increased stress on wildlife and plants due to rapidly shifting climate zones," according to the NASA announcement.
Recent Climate Reports Underestimated How Soon
By heralding the new research paper, NASA is endorsing science that places considerably more urgency on the need to reduce emissions to avoid "disastrous effects" of global warming than was evident in the recent reports from the world's scientists coordinated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The new NASA release emphasizes the danger of "strong amplifying feedbacks" pushing Earth past "dangerous tipping points."
Scientists have been warning for several years that such tipping points are the greatest threat from manmade global warming — and what makes it potentially catastrophic for civilization
We spend a lot of time decrying hack journalism, but let me highlight some of the good work being done. Here is Peter Canellos of the Globe truthsquadding the GOP Presidential candidates:
-- In defending the Iraq war, leading Republican presidential contenders are increasingly echoing words and phrases used by President Bush in the run-up to the war that reinforce the misleading impression that Iraq was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
. . . Senator John McCain . . . suggested that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden would "follow us home" from Iraq -- a comment some viewers may have taken to mean that bin Laden was in Iraq, which he is not.
Former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani asserted, in response to a question about Iraq, that "these people want to follow us here and they have followed us here. Fort Dix happened a week ago. " However, none of the six people arrested for allegedly plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey were from Iraq.
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney . . . said [terroristgroups] have "come together" to try to bring down the United States, though specialists say few of the groups Romney cited have worked together and only some have threatened the United States.
_____________________________________
LETTER FROM WASHINGTON
Democrats in Washington want to keep impeachment off the table
By Steven Thomma
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - The push to impeach President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney is gaining a hearing in some parts of the country, but not in Washington.
More than 70 cities and 14 state Democratic parties have urged impeachment or investigations that could lead to impeachment. The most common charge is that Bush manipulated intelligence to lead the country into the Iraq war. Other charges include spying on Americans and torturing suspected terrorists in violation of U.S. and international law.
Most recently, the Massachusetts Democratic Party voted to push impeachment of both men. The 2,500 state convention delegates voted almost unanimously against Cheney; the vote against Bush was closer.
Massachusetts' Democratic Party thus joined 13 others on the investigate-or-impeach bandwagon, including: Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.
Among the cities and towns, the largest and most recent is Detroit, where the city council voted 7-0 this month to urge Congress to impeach Bush and Cheney for "intentionally misleading Congress and the public regarding the threat from Iraq in order to justify the war."
"There's a lot growing in support," said Tim Carpenter, the director of the liberal group Progressive Democrats of America. "Whether Congress will respond, that's another question."
Indeed. The Democrats who run Congress have no interest in impeaching Bush or Cheney, despite pressure from their party's base outside the Beltway.
It's noteworthy that impeachment pressure is coming from the home states of the two Democratic leaders in Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.
Pelosi said last year that impeachment "is off the table." Under the Constitution, the House impeaches; the Senate then decides whether to convict and remove from office.
It's also interesting that one of the resolutions came from Detroit, home to Rep. John Conyers, who as the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee would lead any impeachment hearings.
The Detroit resolution was co-authored by Monica Conyers, the congressman's wife. But she hasn't had any noticeable clout at home: Conyers said last year that he wasn't interested in impeachment - just oversight investigations - and he hasn't changed his stand.
There are both policy and political reasons that Democratic leaders are risking the anger of their base.
One is that some don't see an impeachable offense in what Bush has done, what the Constitution calls "high crimes and misdemeanors." They might find such evidence in any of the many congressional investigations, but they haven't yet.
Another is that they fear a political backlash from voters similar to the one that punished Republicans after they impeached Bill Clinton. One factor on the side of the pro-impeachment crowd: Clinton was much more popular than Bush.
The third is that they're eager to keep Bush and Cheney around as punching bags for Democratic candidates in the 2008 campaign.
"The political lens they're looking through is the 2008 election," Carpenter said. "They want to see Bush and Cheney dangling so the election is a referendum on them. That is not the correct lens."
To him, the right lens is the last election, when voters threw the Republicans out of power in Congress. Those people, he said, now want Bush and Cheney out.
"There is a groundswell here," Carpenter said. "Pelosi says it's off the table. It's our role to put it on the table."
_______________________________________
NASA: Danger Point Closer Than Thought From Warming
'Disastrous Effects' of Global Warming Tipping Points Near, According to New Study
By BILL BLAKEMOREMay 29, 2007
Even "moderate additional" greenhouse emissions are likely to push Earth past "critical tipping points" with "dangerous consequences for the planet," according to research conducted by NASA and the Columbia University Earth Institute.
With just 10 more years of "business as usual" emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas, says the NASA/Columbia paper, "it becomes impractical" to avoid "disastrous effects."
The study appears in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Its lead author is James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
The forecast effects include "increasingly rapid sea-level rise, increased frequency of droughts and floods, and increased stress on wildlife and plants due to rapidly shifting climate zones," according to the NASA announcement.
Recent Climate Reports Underestimated How Soon
By heralding the new research paper, NASA is endorsing science that places considerably more urgency on the need to reduce emissions to avoid "disastrous effects" of global warming than was evident in the recent reports from the world's scientists coordinated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The new NASA release emphasizes the danger of "strong amplifying feedbacks" pushing Earth past "dangerous tipping points."
Scientists have been warning for several years that such tipping points are the greatest threat from manmade global warming — and what makes it potentially catastrophic for civilization
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Road to War paved with obfuscation
A Laugh
Bill Clinton, John Kerry and George Bush are captured by terrorists and told they will be executed by a firing squad at dawn the next morning. As the sun is rising, Clinton is placed against the wall Just before the order to shoot him is given, he yells, "Earthquake!" The firing squad falls into a panic, Bill jumps over the wall and escapes in the confusion.
John Kerry is the second one placed against the wall. The squad Is reassembled and John ponders what his old pal Bill has done. Before the order to shoot is given, John yells, "Tornado!" Again the squad falls apart and Kerry slips over the wall, thus making his escape
The last person, George W. Bush, is placed against the wall. He thinks, "I see the pattern here, just scream out a disaster and hop over the wall." As the firing squad is reassembled and the rifles raised in his direction, he smirks and yells, "Fire!"
______________________________________
Your Department of Homeland Security at work:
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The Alabama Department of Homeland Security has taken down a Web site it operated that included gay rights and anti-war organizations in a list of groups that could include terrorists.
The Web site identified different types of terrorists, and included a list of groups it believed could spawn terrorists. The list also included environmentalists, animal rights advocates and abortion opponents.
Aren't you glad that this department is on the Job!
_______________________________________
Quote of the Day"My favorite team has always been the Red Sox. I'm also a Yankees fan... This is the thing about me. I can bring people together."-- New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, quoted by the Boston Globe, losing the New England vote.
_____________________________________
The Road to War
In a statement attached to yesterday's 229-page report, the Senate intelligence committee's chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), and three other Democratic panel members said: "The most chilling and prescient warning from the intelligence community prior to the war was that the American invasion would bring about instability in Iraq that would be exploited by Iran and al Qaeda terrorists."
In addition to portraying a terrorist nexus between Iraq and al-Qaeda that did not exist, the Democrats said, the Bush administration "also kept from the American people . . . the sobering intelligence assessments it received at the time" — that an Iraq war could allow al-Qaeda "to establish the presence in Iraq and opportunity to strike at Americans it did not have prior to the invasion."…
Most of the information in the report was drawn from two lengthy assessments issued by the National Intelligence Council in January 2003, titled "Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq" and "Regional Consequences of Regime Change in Iraq," both of which the Senate report reprints with only minor redactions. The assessments were requested by Richard N. Haass, then director of policy planning at the State Department, and were written by Paul R. Pillar, the national intelligence officer for the Near East, as a synthesis of views across the 16-agency intelligence community.
The report includes lists indicating that the analyses, which were reported by The Washington Post last week, were distributed at senior levels of the White House and the State and Defense departments and to the congressional armed services and appropriations committees. At the time, the White House and the Pentagon were saying that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators, democracy would be quickly established and Iraq would become a model for the Middle East. Initial post-invasion plans called for U.S. troop withdrawals to begin in summer 2003.
The classified reports, however, predicted that establishing a stable democratic government would be a long challenge because Iraq's political culture did "not foster liberalism or democracy" and there was "no concept of loyal opposition and no history of alternation of power."
They also said that competing Sunni, Shiite and Kurd factions would "encourage terrorist groups to take advantage of a volatile security environment to launch attacks within Iraq." Because of the divided Iraqi society, there was "a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so."
While predicting that terrorist threats heightened by the invasion would probably decline within five years, the assessments said that lines between al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world "could become blurred." U.S. occupation of Iraq "probably would boost proponents of political Islam" throughout the Muslim world and "funds for terrorist groups probably would increase as a result of Muslim outrage over U.S. actions." (emphasis mine)
The LATimes has more, including this, which I think is the most damning thing anyone could ever say about an administration sending soliders off to war:
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), said the report demonstrated that "the intelligence community gave the administration plenty of warning about the difficulties we would face if the decision was made to go to war."
He added: "These dire warnings were widely distributed at the highest levels of government, and it's clear that the administration didn't plan administration didn't plan for any of them." (emphasis mine)
This is what is so unforgiveable. I do not care what your political affiliation might be, I don't care whether you are a militarist or a pacifist — we ought to all agree, from the get go, that if you are going to send men and women to battle, where they risk losing life and limb, that you have better damn well do everything possible to plan for every worst case scenario about which you have been warned, and any others about which you might think would be possible. Anything less is sloppy and, worse, disrespectful to the lives of the men and women in uniform and to their families.
And on this Memorial Day weekend and every day of dereliction of duty before it and after…the nation certainly deserves better than this. Our soldiers sure as hell deserve more consideration and planning than they were given — and George Bush's ego is hardly justification enough for any of this.
There are still two more sections of the Phase II analysis in the Senate Intelligence Committee to come. Depite Kit Bond's claims of partisan rancor, the first segment of the report was approved by a bi-partisan majority — with a 10-5 vote in the commmittee that included two Republicans. The third section, which details the investigation of politicization and misuse of intelligence in public statements by officials is said to be the biggest current hold-up, both for declassification and wording issues on which the various committee factions and staffers cannot seem to agree. But the fact that we know even this little bit of background publicly likely means that the Bush Administration is missing Pat Roberts stranglehold on the whole thing at this point, because even this tiny portion is damning in its portrait of disregard for the fiduciary obligation that ought to be owed to our nation's soldiers.
Laura Rozen has a link to the PDF of the full report, as well as a statement from Sen. Rockefeller on its issuance. Steve Clemons has some interesting bits from Pat Lang and Larry Wilkerson, and their interactions with Feith, Tenet and Wolfowitz — and it is well worth a read. Larry Johnson adds a bit more, as he was there as well.
Imagine having the curator job at the Bush Presidential Library in about 30 years, let alone being its PR director. History's lens is not going to be kind, no matter how many coats of varnish they may try to give
Bill Clinton, John Kerry and George Bush are captured by terrorists and told they will be executed by a firing squad at dawn the next morning. As the sun is rising, Clinton is placed against the wall Just before the order to shoot him is given, he yells, "Earthquake!" The firing squad falls into a panic, Bill jumps over the wall and escapes in the confusion.
John Kerry is the second one placed against the wall. The squad Is reassembled and John ponders what his old pal Bill has done. Before the order to shoot is given, John yells, "Tornado!" Again the squad falls apart and Kerry slips over the wall, thus making his escape
The last person, George W. Bush, is placed against the wall. He thinks, "I see the pattern here, just scream out a disaster and hop over the wall." As the firing squad is reassembled and the rifles raised in his direction, he smirks and yells, "Fire!"
______________________________________
Your Department of Homeland Security at work:
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The Alabama Department of Homeland Security has taken down a Web site it operated that included gay rights and anti-war organizations in a list of groups that could include terrorists.
The Web site identified different types of terrorists, and included a list of groups it believed could spawn terrorists. The list also included environmentalists, animal rights advocates and abortion opponents.
Aren't you glad that this department is on the Job!
_______________________________________
Quote of the Day"My favorite team has always been the Red Sox. I'm also a Yankees fan... This is the thing about me. I can bring people together."-- New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, quoted by the Boston Globe, losing the New England vote.
_____________________________________
The Road to War
In a statement attached to yesterday's 229-page report, the Senate intelligence committee's chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), and three other Democratic panel members said: "The most chilling and prescient warning from the intelligence community prior to the war was that the American invasion would bring about instability in Iraq that would be exploited by Iran and al Qaeda terrorists."
In addition to portraying a terrorist nexus between Iraq and al-Qaeda that did not exist, the Democrats said, the Bush administration "also kept from the American people . . . the sobering intelligence assessments it received at the time" — that an Iraq war could allow al-Qaeda "to establish the presence in Iraq and opportunity to strike at Americans it did not have prior to the invasion."…
Most of the information in the report was drawn from two lengthy assessments issued by the National Intelligence Council in January 2003, titled "Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq" and "Regional Consequences of Regime Change in Iraq," both of which the Senate report reprints with only minor redactions. The assessments were requested by Richard N. Haass, then director of policy planning at the State Department, and were written by Paul R. Pillar, the national intelligence officer for the Near East, as a synthesis of views across the 16-agency intelligence community.
The report includes lists indicating that the analyses, which were reported by The Washington Post last week, were distributed at senior levels of the White House and the State and Defense departments and to the congressional armed services and appropriations committees. At the time, the White House and the Pentagon were saying that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators, democracy would be quickly established and Iraq would become a model for the Middle East. Initial post-invasion plans called for U.S. troop withdrawals to begin in summer 2003.
The classified reports, however, predicted that establishing a stable democratic government would be a long challenge because Iraq's political culture did "not foster liberalism or democracy" and there was "no concept of loyal opposition and no history of alternation of power."
They also said that competing Sunni, Shiite and Kurd factions would "encourage terrorist groups to take advantage of a volatile security environment to launch attacks within Iraq." Because of the divided Iraqi society, there was "a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so."
While predicting that terrorist threats heightened by the invasion would probably decline within five years, the assessments said that lines between al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world "could become blurred." U.S. occupation of Iraq "probably would boost proponents of political Islam" throughout the Muslim world and "funds for terrorist groups probably would increase as a result of Muslim outrage over U.S. actions." (emphasis mine)
The LATimes has more, including this, which I think is the most damning thing anyone could ever say about an administration sending soliders off to war:
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), said the report demonstrated that "the intelligence community gave the administration plenty of warning about the difficulties we would face if the decision was made to go to war."
He added: "These dire warnings were widely distributed at the highest levels of government, and it's clear that the administration didn't plan administration didn't plan for any of them." (emphasis mine)
This is what is so unforgiveable. I do not care what your political affiliation might be, I don't care whether you are a militarist or a pacifist — we ought to all agree, from the get go, that if you are going to send men and women to battle, where they risk losing life and limb, that you have better damn well do everything possible to plan for every worst case scenario about which you have been warned, and any others about which you might think would be possible. Anything less is sloppy and, worse, disrespectful to the lives of the men and women in uniform and to their families.
And on this Memorial Day weekend and every day of dereliction of duty before it and after…the nation certainly deserves better than this. Our soldiers sure as hell deserve more consideration and planning than they were given — and George Bush's ego is hardly justification enough for any of this.
There are still two more sections of the Phase II analysis in the Senate Intelligence Committee to come. Depite Kit Bond's claims of partisan rancor, the first segment of the report was approved by a bi-partisan majority — with a 10-5 vote in the commmittee that included two Republicans. The third section, which details the investigation of politicization and misuse of intelligence in public statements by officials is said to be the biggest current hold-up, both for declassification and wording issues on which the various committee factions and staffers cannot seem to agree. But the fact that we know even this little bit of background publicly likely means that the Bush Administration is missing Pat Roberts stranglehold on the whole thing at this point, because even this tiny portion is damning in its portrait of disregard for the fiduciary obligation that ought to be owed to our nation's soldiers.
Laura Rozen has a link to the PDF of the full report, as well as a statement from Sen. Rockefeller on its issuance. Steve Clemons has some interesting bits from Pat Lang and Larry Wilkerson, and their interactions with Feith, Tenet and Wolfowitz — and it is well worth a read. Larry Johnson adds a bit more, as he was there as well.
Imagine having the curator job at the Bush Presidential Library in about 30 years, let alone being its PR director. History's lens is not going to be kind, no matter how many coats of varnish they may try to give
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Mashuga
_______________________________________
Bush Plans 'Second Surge' To Double Iraq Combat Troops
San Francisco Chronicle Stewart M. Powell Posted May 22, 2007 08:48 AM
The Bush administration is quietly on track to nearly double the number of combat troops in Iraq this year, an analysis of Pentagon deployment orders showed Monday.
The little-noticed second surge, designed to reinforce U.S. troops in Iraq, is being executed by sending more combat brigades and extending tours of duty for troops already there
White House Is Said to Debate ’08 Cut in Iraq Troops by 50%
By DAVID E. SANGER and DAVID S. CLOUD
WASHINGTON, May 25 — The Bush administration is developing what are described as concepts for reducing American combat forces in Iraq by as much as half next year, according to senior administration officials in the midst of the internal debate.
JUST IN TIME FOR ELECTIONS
_______________________________________
More #@%^+**!=:!~*> Global Warming Denial
by Meteor Blades
Sat May 26, 2007 at 01:10:08 AM PDT
Even after the experience of all these years, the stupidity and greed of Bush & his Cronies still can leave one breathless. From the Guardian:
US rejects all proposals on climate change
The US has rejected any prospect of a deal on climate change at the G8 summit in Germany next month, according to a leaked document.
Despite Tony Blair's declaration on Thursday that Washington would sign up to "at least the beginnings" of action to cut carbon emissions, a note attached to a draft document circulated by Germany says the US is "fundamentally opposed" to the proposals.
The note, written in red ink, says the deal "runs counter to our overall position and crosses multiple 'red lines' in terms of what we simply cannot agree to". ...
The tone is blunt, with whole pages of the draft crossed out and even the mildest statements about confirming previous agreements rejected. "The proposals within the sections titled 'Fighting Climate Change' and 'Carbon Markets' are fundamentally incompatible with the President's approach to climate change," says another red-ink comment.
This is embarrassing for Mr Blair, who said on Thursday with some confidence that the US was moderating its position on climate change as the summit approached.
On the same story, The New York Times reports:
The push back by the Bush administration over the German proposal has left many European diplomats furious. "The United States, on this issue, is virtually isolated," one European diplomat said on condition of anonymity under diplomatic rules, and then added, "with the exception of other big polluters."
Both Ms. Merkel and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain have, in private talks with President Bush, pushed for the United States to agree to the European proposal.
The Bush Administration has been pretending for a couple of years that it acknowledges the reality of global warming. When it comes to more than words, however, the acknowledgment is nowhere to be found. And, as numerous doctored scientific reports and censored scientists attest, some words aren't allowed either.
By its behavior the Bush Administration simultaneously continues to make the United States the planet's biggest global warming generator and its most outrageous global warming denier.
_______________________________________
'Noah's Ark' of 5,000 rare animals found floating off the coast of China.
Cargo of abandoned vessel destined for restaurants· Illegal trade drives species closer to extinction Jonathan Watts in BeijingSaturday May 26, 2007The Guardian
Endangered, hunted, smuggled and now abandoned, 5,000 of the world's rarest animals have been found drifting in a deserted boat near the coast of China.
The pangolins, Asian giant turtles and lizards were crushed inside crates on a rickety wooden vessel that had lost engine power off Qingzhou island in the southern province of Guangdong. Most were alive, though the cargo also contained 21 bear paws wrapped in newspaper.
According to conservation groups, the haul was discovered on one of the world's most lucrative and destructive smuggling routes: from the threatened jungles of south-east Asia to the restaurant tables of southern China.
The animals were found when local fishermen noticed a strange smell emanating from the vessel, which did not have any registration plates, on Tuesday, the Guangzhou Daily reported.
When coastguard officials boarded the 25-metre craft, it was reportedly deserted and stripped of identification papers. They found more than 200 crates full of animals, many so dehydrated in the tropical sun that they were close to death.
The animals - which weighed 13 tonnes - were taken to port, doused with water and sent to an animal welfare centre. "We have received some animals," said an office worker at the Guangdong Wild Animal Protection Centre. "We are waiting to hear from the authorities what we should do with them."
According to the local media, the cargo included 31 pangolins, 44 leatherback turtles, 2,720 monitor lizards, 1,130 Brazilian turtles as well as the bear paws. Photographs showed other animals, including an Asian giant turtle.
All of these south-east Asian species are critically endangered, banned from international trade and yet openly sold in restaurants and markets in China's southern province of Guangdong, which is famous for its exotic cuisine.
The accidental discovery highlights the negative impact that the growing power of Chinese consumption is having on global conservation efforts.
According to wildlife groups, China is the main market for illegally traded exotic species, which are eaten or used in traditional medicine. Pangolins are in great demand because their meat is consider a delicacy and their scales are thought to help mothers breastfeed their babies.
As a result of demand, the pangolin populations of China, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia have been wiped out. With traders moving further and further south, the animal is declining even in its last habitats in Java, Sumatra and the Malaysian peninsula. It is a similar story for many species of turtle, tortoise, frog and snake.
Despite China's international commitments to get to grips with this illicit activity, the trade is booming. Border controls are lax, and smugglers know that fines are usually far lower than the potential rewards. As a result, raids and seizures of banned products occur regularly. One recent raid on a restaurant in Guanghzou turned up 118 pangolins, 60kg of snakes and 400kg of toads.
Traffic - an organisation that monitors and tries to prevent the smuggling of endangered species - welcomed the fact that China's authorities had reacted swiftly to rescue the animals but said much more needs to be done to prevent similar cases.
"Unfortunately, this is all too common. This trade is a far bigger threat to these species than habitat destruction," said Chris Shepherd, senior program officer with Traffic Southeast Asia. "The vigilance on the border has to be improved, cooperation with source countries needs to be strengthened, there should be better monitoring of dealers, and the people violating the laws must be penalised severely."
Despite the ban on pangolins, many restaurants offer their meat. The Chaoxing restaurant in Shenzhen said yesterday that pangolin was available but was only suitable for large dining parties.
"The animal is very big - about 10kg," said a waitress contacted by telephone. "We serve it in hotpot. That is the tastiest way."
According to recent reports in the Chinese media, the price of 1kg of pangolin served in Guangdong or Yunnan is between 600 and 800 yuan per kilogram (between £43 and £50).
A Guangdong chef interviewed last year in the Beijing Science and Technology Daily described how to cook a pangolin.
"We keep them alive in cages until the customer makes an order. Then we hammer them unconscious, cut their throats and drain the blood. It is a slow death. We then boil them to remove the scales. We cut the meat into small pieces and use it to make a number of dishes, including braised meat and soup. Usually the customers take the blood home with them afterwards
Friday, May 25, 2007
Betrayed
Senate passes Iraq War funding bill 80-14. To their credit Clinton,Dodd and Obama voted against it.
____________________________________
The Entire Government Has Failed Us on Iraq By Keith Olbermann
For the president, and the majority leaders and candidates and rank-and-file Congressmen and Senators of either party - there is only blame for this shameful, and bi-partisan, betrayal.
This is, in fact, a comment about… betrayal.
Few men or women elected in our history - whether executive or legislative, state or national - have been sent into office with a mandate more obvious, nor instructions more clear:
Get us out of Iraq.
Yet after six months of preparation and execution - half a year gathering the strands of public support; translating into action, the collective will of the nearly 70 percent of Americans who reject this War of Lies, the Democrats have managed only this:
The Democratic leadership has surrendered to a president - if not the worst president, then easily the most selfish, in our history - who happily blackmails his own people, and uses his own military personnel as hostages to his asinine demand, that the Democrats "give the troops their money";
The Democratic leadership has agreed to finance the deaths of Americans in a war that has only reduced the security of Americans;
The Democratic leadership has given Mr. Bush all that he wanted, with the only caveat being, not merely meaningless symbolism about benchmarks for the Iraqi government, but optional meaningless symbolism about benchmarks for the Iraqi government.
The Democratic leadership has, in sum, claimed a compromise with the Administration, in which the only things truly compromised, are the trust of the voters, the ethics of the Democrats, and the lives of our brave, and doomed, friends, and family, in Iraq.
You, the men and women elected with the simplest of directions - Stop The War - have traded your strength, your bargaining position, and the uniform support of those who elected you… for a handful of magic beans.
You may trot out every political cliché from the soft-soap, inside-the-beltway dictionary of boilerplate sound bites, about how this is the "beginning of the end" of Mr. Bush-s "carte blanche" in Iraq, about how this is a "first step."
Well, Senator Reid, the only end at its beginning... is our collective hope that you and your colleagues would do what is right, what is essential, what you were each elected and re-elected to do.
Because this "first step"… is a step right off a cliff.
And this President!
How shameful it would be to watch an adult... hold his breath, and threaten to continue to do so, until he turned blue.
But how horrifying it is… to watch a President hold his breath and threaten to continue to do so, until innocent and patriotic Americans in harm-s way, are bled white.
You lead this country, sir?
You claim to defend it?
And yet when faced with the prospect of someone calling you on your stubbornness - your stubbornness which has cost 3,431 Americans their lives and thousands more their limbs - you, Mr. Bush, imply that if the Democrats don-t give you the money and give it to you entirely on your terms, the troops in Iraq will be stranded, or forced to serve longer, or have to throw bullets at the enemy with their bare hands.
How transcendentally, how historically, pathetic.
Any other president from any other moment in the panorama of our history would have, at the outset of this tawdry game of political chicken, declared that no matter what the other political side did, he would insure personally - first, last and always - that the troops would not suffer.
A President, Mr. Bush, uses the carte blanche he has already, not to manipulate an overlap of arriving and departing Brigades into a ‘second surge,- but to say in unequivocal terms that if it takes every last dime of the monies already allocated, if it takes reneging on government contracts with Halliburton, he will make sure the troops are safe - even if the only safety to be found, is in getting them the hell out of there.
Well, any true President would have done that, Sir.
You instead, used our troops as political pawns, then blamed the Democrats when you did so.
Not that these Democrats, who had this country-s support and sympathy up until 48 hours ago, have not since earned all the blame they can carry home.
"We seem to be very near the bleak choice between war and shame," Winston Churchill wrote to Lord Moyne in the days after the British signed the Munich accords with Germany in 1938. "My feeling is that we shall choose shame, and then have war thrown in, a little later…"
That-s what this is for the Democrats, isn-t it?
Their "Neville Chamberlain moment" before the Second World War.
All that-s missing is the landing at the airport, with the blinkered leader waving a piece of paper which he naively thought would guarantee "peace in our time," but which his opponent would ignore with deceit.
The Democrats have merely streamlined the process.
Their piece of paper already says Mr. Bush can ignore it, with impugnity.
And where are the Democratic presidential hopefuls this evening?
See they not, that to which the Senate and House leadership has blinded itself?
Judging these candidates based on how they voted on the original Iraq authorization, or waiting for apologies for those votes, is ancient history now.
The Democratic nomination is likely to be decided... tomorrow.
The talk of practical politics, the buying into of the President-s dishonest construction "fund-the-troops-or-they-will-be-in-jeopardy," the promise of tougher action in September, is falling not on deaf ears, but rather falling on Americans who already told you what to do, and now perceive your ears as closed to practical politics.
Those who seek the Democratic nomination need to - for their own political futures and, with a thousand times more solemnity and importance, for the individual futures of our troops - denounce this betrayal, vote against it, and, if need be, unseat Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi if they continue down this path of guilty, fatal acquiescence to the tragically misguided will of a monomaniacal president.
For, ultimately, at this hour, the entire government has failed us.
Mr. Reid, Mr. Hoyer, and the other Democrats... have failed us.
They negotiated away that which they did not own, but had only been entrusted by us to protect: our collective will as the citizens of this country, that this brazen War of Lies be ended as rapidly and safely as possible.
Mr. Bush and his government... have failed us.
They have behaved venomously and without dignity - of course.
That is all at which Mr. Bush is gifted.
We are the ones providing any element of surprise or shock here.
With the exception of Senator Dodd and Senator Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidates have (so far at least) failed us.
They must now speak, and make plain how they view what has been given away to Mr. Bush, and what is yet to be given away tomorrow, and in the thousand tomorrows to come.
Because for the next fourteen months, the Democratic nominating process - indeed the whole of our political discourse until further notice - has, with the stroke of a cursed pen, become about one thing, and one thing alone.
The electorate figured this out, six months ago.
The President and the Republicans have not - doubtless will not.
The Democrats will figure it out, during the Memorial Day recess, when they go home and many of those who elected them will politely suggest they stay there - and permanently.Because, on the subject of Iraq...
The people have been ahead of the media....
Ahead of the government...
Ahead of the politicians...
For the last year, or two years, or maybe three.
Our politics... is now about the answer to one briefly-worded question.
Mr. Bush has failed.
Mr. Warner has failed.
Mr. Reid has failed.
So.
Who among us will stop this war - this War of Lies?
To he or she, fall the figurative keys to the nation.
To all the others - presidents and majority leaders and candidates and rank-and-file Congressmen and Senators of either party - there is only blame… for this shameful, and bi-partisan, betrayal.
______________________________________
The Congressional Democrats: Only a Best-Case Scenario?
Harry Shearer,
The decision by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to throw in the towel on the Iraq-withdrawal timeline has been widely denounced by the left and acknowledged by the Conventional Wisdomariat as the Dems coming to terms with "political reality". That reality, of course, is that George W. Bush was prepared to tough it out, to veto timeline-plus-funding bill after timeline-plus-funding bill, and to blame the Dems for the result.course, is that George W. Bush was prepared to tough it out, to veto timeline-plus-funding bill after timeline-plus-funding bill, and to blame the Dems for the result.
What this sad spectacle teaches us, I think, is that the Democrats, in their pathetic excuse for strategizing, have replicated one of the basic flaws of the Bush regime, documented in Thomas Ricks' essential history of the Iraq war, Fiasco: the insistence on basing strategic decisions on best-case scenarios, and discarding (or refusing even to consider) worst-case scenarios. What other explanation is there for the Dems' behavior?
They assumed they could out-bluff the Bluffer in Chief, and their backup plan was as profound and nuanced as the Bush administration's plan for a post-war epoch in which flowers were not strewn by Iraqis at our soldiers, at least without explosive devices inside. The Democrats never apparently envisioned the George W. Bush we all know--a stubborn cynical true believer who is prepared to sacrifice everything for the sake of his crusade in the middle east. Had the Dems actually faced the reality of their adversary--had Bush actually faced the nature of the situation into which he brought us and our troops--America's current plight might be substantially less dire. Perhaps the sole threshold question for any candidate seeking our vote in 2008 should be: what's your backup plan in case the worst case turns out to be reality?
_____________________________________
Tainted Chinese Imports Common By Rick Weiss
In four months, FDA refused 298 shipments.
Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical.
Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics.
Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria.
Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides.
These were among the 107 food imports from China that the Food and Drug Administration detained at U.S. ports just last month, agency documents reveal, along with more than 1,000 shipments of tainted Chinese dietary supplements, toxic Chinese cosmetics and counterfeit Chinese medicines.
For years, U.S. inspection records show, China has flooded the United States with foods unfit for human consumption. And for years, FDA inspectors have simply returned to Chinese importers the small portion of those products they caught - many of which turned up at U.S. borders again, making a second or third attempt at entry.
Now the confluence of two events - the highly publicized contamination of U.S. chicken, pork and fish with tainted Chinese pet food ingredients and this week's resumption of high-level economic and trade talks with China - has activists and members of Congress demanding that the United States tell China it is fed up.
Dead pets and melamine-tainted food notwithstanding, change will prove difficult, policy experts say, in large part because U.S. companies have become so dependent on the Chinese economy that tighter rules on imports stand to harm the U.S. economy, too.
"So many U.S. companies are directly or indirectly involved in China now, the commercial interest of the United States these days has become to allow imports to come in as quickly and smoothly as possible," said Robert B. Cassidy, a former assistant U.S. trade representative for China and now director of international trade and services for Kelley Drye Collier Shannon, a Washington law firm.
As a result, the United States finds itself "kowtowing to China," Cassidy said, even as that country keeps sending American consumers adulterated and mislabeled foods.
It's not just about cheap imports, added Carol Tucker Foreman, a former assistant secretary of agriculture now at the Consumer Federation of America.
U.S. agricultural exports to China have grown to more than $5 billion a year - a fraction of last year's $232 billion U.S. trade deficit with China but a number that has enormous growth potential, given the Chinese economy's 10 percent growth rate and its billion-plus consumers.
And for some products they have had little choice, as China has driven competitors out of business with its rock-bottom prices.
But after the pet food scandal, some are recalculating.
"This isn't the first time we've had an incident from a Chinese supplier," said Pat Verduin, a senior vice president at the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a trade group in Washington. "Food safety is integral to brands and to companies. This is not an issue the industry is taking lightly."
New Focus on the Problem
China's less-than-stellar behavior as a food exporter is revealed in stomach-turning detail in FDA "refusal reports" filed by U.S. inspectors: Juices and fruits rejected as "filthy." Prunes tinted with chemical dyes not approved for human consumption. Frozen breaded shrimp preserved with nitrofuran, an antibacterial that can cause cancer. Swordfish rejected as "poisonous."
In the first four months of 2007, FDA inspectors - who are able to check out less than 1 percent of regulated imports - refused 298 food shipments from China. By contrast, 56 shipments from Canada were rejected, even though Canada exports about $10 billion in FDA-regulated food and agricultural products to the United States - compared to about $2 billion from China.
Although China is subject to more inspections because of its poor record, those figures mean that the rejection rate for foods imported from China, on a dollar-for-dollar basis, is more than 25 times that for Canada.
Miao Changxia, of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said China "attaches great importance" to the pet food debacle. "Investigations were immediately carried out ... and a host of emergency measures have been taken to ensure the hygiene and safety of exported plant-origin protein products," she said in an e-mail.
But deception by Chinese exporters is not limited to plant products, and some of their most egregiously unfit exports are smuggled into the United States.
Under Agriculture Department rules, countries cannot export meat and poultry products to the United States unless the USDA certifies that the slaughterhouses and processing plants have food-safety systems equivalent to those here. Much to its frustration, China is not certified to sell any meat to the United States because it has not met that requirement.
But that has not stopped Chinese meat exporters. In the past year, USDA teams have seized hundreds of thousands of pounds of prohibited poultry products from China and other Asian countries, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns announced in March. Some were shipped in crates labeled "dried lily flower," "prune slices" and "vegetables," according to news reports. It is unclear how much of the illegal meat slipped in undetected.
Despite those violations, the Chinese government is on track to get permission to legally export its chickens to the United States - a prospect that has raised concern not only because of fears of bacteria such as salmonella but also because Chinese chickens, if not properly processed, could be a source of avian flu, which public-health authorities fear may be poised to trigger a human pandemic.
Last year, under high-level pressure from China, the USDA passed a rule allowing China to export to the United States chickens that were grown and slaughtered in North America and then processed in China - a rule that quickly passed through multiple levels of review and was approved the day before Chinese President Hu Jintao arrived in Washington last April.
"It's not being facilitated or accelerated through the system at all," Raymond said of the chicken rule, adding that permission for China to sell poultry to the United States is moving ahead because recent USDA audits found China's poultry slaughterhouses to be equivalent to those here.
Tony Corbo, a lobbyist for Food and Water Watch, a Washington advocacy group, said that finding - which is not subject to outside review - is unbelievable, given repeated findings of unsanitary conditions at China's chicken slaughterhouses. Corbo said he has seen some of those audits. "Everyone who has seen them was grossed out," he said.
An Official Response
For a growing number of important food products, China has become virtually the only source in the world.
China controls 80 percent of the world's production of ascorbic acid, for example, a valuable preservative that is ubiquitous in processed and other foods. Only one producer remains in the United States, Hubbard said.
"That's true of a lot of ingredients," he said, including the wheat gluten that was initially thought to be the cause of the pet deaths. Virtually none of it is made in the United States, because the Chinese sell it for less than it would cost U.S. manufacturers to make it.
So pervasive is the U.S. hunger for cheap imports, experts said, that the executive branch itself has repeatedly rebuffed proposals by agency scientists to impose even modest new safety rules for foreign foods.
"Sometimes guidances can get through, but not regulations," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group. Guidances, which the FDA defines as "current thinking on a particular subject," are not binding.
Under the Bush administration in particular, DeWaal said, if a proposed regulation does get past agency or department heads, it hits the wall at the White House Office of Management and Budget.
John C. Bailar III, a University of Chicago professor emeritus who chaired a 2003 National Academies committee that recommended major changes in the U.S. food safety system - which have gone largely unheeded - said he has become increasingly concerned that corporations and the federal government seem willing to put the interests of business "above the public welfare."
"This nation has - and has had for decades - a pressing need for a wholly dedicated food safety agency, one that is independent and not concerned with other matters ... to bring together and extend the bits of food safety activities now scattered over more than a dozen agencies," he said in an e-mail.
Legislation to create such an agency was recently introduced, though many suspect that is too big a challenge politically.
____________________________________
The Entire Government Has Failed Us on Iraq By Keith Olbermann
For the president, and the majority leaders and candidates and rank-and-file Congressmen and Senators of either party - there is only blame for this shameful, and bi-partisan, betrayal.
This is, in fact, a comment about… betrayal.
Few men or women elected in our history - whether executive or legislative, state or national - have been sent into office with a mandate more obvious, nor instructions more clear:
Get us out of Iraq.
Yet after six months of preparation and execution - half a year gathering the strands of public support; translating into action, the collective will of the nearly 70 percent of Americans who reject this War of Lies, the Democrats have managed only this:
The Democratic leadership has surrendered to a president - if not the worst president, then easily the most selfish, in our history - who happily blackmails his own people, and uses his own military personnel as hostages to his asinine demand, that the Democrats "give the troops their money";
The Democratic leadership has agreed to finance the deaths of Americans in a war that has only reduced the security of Americans;
The Democratic leadership has given Mr. Bush all that he wanted, with the only caveat being, not merely meaningless symbolism about benchmarks for the Iraqi government, but optional meaningless symbolism about benchmarks for the Iraqi government.
The Democratic leadership has, in sum, claimed a compromise with the Administration, in which the only things truly compromised, are the trust of the voters, the ethics of the Democrats, and the lives of our brave, and doomed, friends, and family, in Iraq.
You, the men and women elected with the simplest of directions - Stop The War - have traded your strength, your bargaining position, and the uniform support of those who elected you… for a handful of magic beans.
You may trot out every political cliché from the soft-soap, inside-the-beltway dictionary of boilerplate sound bites, about how this is the "beginning of the end" of Mr. Bush-s "carte blanche" in Iraq, about how this is a "first step."
Well, Senator Reid, the only end at its beginning... is our collective hope that you and your colleagues would do what is right, what is essential, what you were each elected and re-elected to do.
Because this "first step"… is a step right off a cliff.
And this President!
How shameful it would be to watch an adult... hold his breath, and threaten to continue to do so, until he turned blue.
But how horrifying it is… to watch a President hold his breath and threaten to continue to do so, until innocent and patriotic Americans in harm-s way, are bled white.
You lead this country, sir?
You claim to defend it?
And yet when faced with the prospect of someone calling you on your stubbornness - your stubbornness which has cost 3,431 Americans their lives and thousands more their limbs - you, Mr. Bush, imply that if the Democrats don-t give you the money and give it to you entirely on your terms, the troops in Iraq will be stranded, or forced to serve longer, or have to throw bullets at the enemy with their bare hands.
How transcendentally, how historically, pathetic.
Any other president from any other moment in the panorama of our history would have, at the outset of this tawdry game of political chicken, declared that no matter what the other political side did, he would insure personally - first, last and always - that the troops would not suffer.
A President, Mr. Bush, uses the carte blanche he has already, not to manipulate an overlap of arriving and departing Brigades into a ‘second surge,- but to say in unequivocal terms that if it takes every last dime of the monies already allocated, if it takes reneging on government contracts with Halliburton, he will make sure the troops are safe - even if the only safety to be found, is in getting them the hell out of there.
Well, any true President would have done that, Sir.
You instead, used our troops as political pawns, then blamed the Democrats when you did so.
Not that these Democrats, who had this country-s support and sympathy up until 48 hours ago, have not since earned all the blame they can carry home.
"We seem to be very near the bleak choice between war and shame," Winston Churchill wrote to Lord Moyne in the days after the British signed the Munich accords with Germany in 1938. "My feeling is that we shall choose shame, and then have war thrown in, a little later…"
That-s what this is for the Democrats, isn-t it?
Their "Neville Chamberlain moment" before the Second World War.
All that-s missing is the landing at the airport, with the blinkered leader waving a piece of paper which he naively thought would guarantee "peace in our time," but which his opponent would ignore with deceit.
The Democrats have merely streamlined the process.
Their piece of paper already says Mr. Bush can ignore it, with impugnity.
And where are the Democratic presidential hopefuls this evening?
See they not, that to which the Senate and House leadership has blinded itself?
Judging these candidates based on how they voted on the original Iraq authorization, or waiting for apologies for those votes, is ancient history now.
The Democratic nomination is likely to be decided... tomorrow.
The talk of practical politics, the buying into of the President-s dishonest construction "fund-the-troops-or-they-will-be-in-jeopardy," the promise of tougher action in September, is falling not on deaf ears, but rather falling on Americans who already told you what to do, and now perceive your ears as closed to practical politics.
Those who seek the Democratic nomination need to - for their own political futures and, with a thousand times more solemnity and importance, for the individual futures of our troops - denounce this betrayal, vote against it, and, if need be, unseat Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi if they continue down this path of guilty, fatal acquiescence to the tragically misguided will of a monomaniacal president.
For, ultimately, at this hour, the entire government has failed us.
Mr. Reid, Mr. Hoyer, and the other Democrats... have failed us.
They negotiated away that which they did not own, but had only been entrusted by us to protect: our collective will as the citizens of this country, that this brazen War of Lies be ended as rapidly and safely as possible.
Mr. Bush and his government... have failed us.
They have behaved venomously and without dignity - of course.
That is all at which Mr. Bush is gifted.
We are the ones providing any element of surprise or shock here.
With the exception of Senator Dodd and Senator Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidates have (so far at least) failed us.
They must now speak, and make plain how they view what has been given away to Mr. Bush, and what is yet to be given away tomorrow, and in the thousand tomorrows to come.
Because for the next fourteen months, the Democratic nominating process - indeed the whole of our political discourse until further notice - has, with the stroke of a cursed pen, become about one thing, and one thing alone.
The electorate figured this out, six months ago.
The President and the Republicans have not - doubtless will not.
The Democrats will figure it out, during the Memorial Day recess, when they go home and many of those who elected them will politely suggest they stay there - and permanently.Because, on the subject of Iraq...
The people have been ahead of the media....
Ahead of the government...
Ahead of the politicians...
For the last year, or two years, or maybe three.
Our politics... is now about the answer to one briefly-worded question.
Mr. Bush has failed.
Mr. Warner has failed.
Mr. Reid has failed.
So.
Who among us will stop this war - this War of Lies?
To he or she, fall the figurative keys to the nation.
To all the others - presidents and majority leaders and candidates and rank-and-file Congressmen and Senators of either party - there is only blame… for this shameful, and bi-partisan, betrayal.
______________________________________
The Congressional Democrats: Only a Best-Case Scenario?
Harry Shearer,
The decision by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to throw in the towel on the Iraq-withdrawal timeline has been widely denounced by the left and acknowledged by the Conventional Wisdomariat as the Dems coming to terms with "political reality". That reality, of course, is that George W. Bush was prepared to tough it out, to veto timeline-plus-funding bill after timeline-plus-funding bill, and to blame the Dems for the result.course, is that George W. Bush was prepared to tough it out, to veto timeline-plus-funding bill after timeline-plus-funding bill, and to blame the Dems for the result.
What this sad spectacle teaches us, I think, is that the Democrats, in their pathetic excuse for strategizing, have replicated one of the basic flaws of the Bush regime, documented in Thomas Ricks' essential history of the Iraq war, Fiasco: the insistence on basing strategic decisions on best-case scenarios, and discarding (or refusing even to consider) worst-case scenarios. What other explanation is there for the Dems' behavior?
They assumed they could out-bluff the Bluffer in Chief, and their backup plan was as profound and nuanced as the Bush administration's plan for a post-war epoch in which flowers were not strewn by Iraqis at our soldiers, at least without explosive devices inside. The Democrats never apparently envisioned the George W. Bush we all know--a stubborn cynical true believer who is prepared to sacrifice everything for the sake of his crusade in the middle east. Had the Dems actually faced the reality of their adversary--had Bush actually faced the nature of the situation into which he brought us and our troops--America's current plight might be substantially less dire. Perhaps the sole threshold question for any candidate seeking our vote in 2008 should be: what's your backup plan in case the worst case turns out to be reality?
_____________________________________
Tainted Chinese Imports Common By Rick Weiss
In four months, FDA refused 298 shipments.
Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical.
Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics.
Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria.
Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides.
These were among the 107 food imports from China that the Food and Drug Administration detained at U.S. ports just last month, agency documents reveal, along with more than 1,000 shipments of tainted Chinese dietary supplements, toxic Chinese cosmetics and counterfeit Chinese medicines.
For years, U.S. inspection records show, China has flooded the United States with foods unfit for human consumption. And for years, FDA inspectors have simply returned to Chinese importers the small portion of those products they caught - many of which turned up at U.S. borders again, making a second or third attempt at entry.
Now the confluence of two events - the highly publicized contamination of U.S. chicken, pork and fish with tainted Chinese pet food ingredients and this week's resumption of high-level economic and trade talks with China - has activists and members of Congress demanding that the United States tell China it is fed up.
Dead pets and melamine-tainted food notwithstanding, change will prove difficult, policy experts say, in large part because U.S. companies have become so dependent on the Chinese economy that tighter rules on imports stand to harm the U.S. economy, too.
"So many U.S. companies are directly or indirectly involved in China now, the commercial interest of the United States these days has become to allow imports to come in as quickly and smoothly as possible," said Robert B. Cassidy, a former assistant U.S. trade representative for China and now director of international trade and services for Kelley Drye Collier Shannon, a Washington law firm.
As a result, the United States finds itself "kowtowing to China," Cassidy said, even as that country keeps sending American consumers adulterated and mislabeled foods.
It's not just about cheap imports, added Carol Tucker Foreman, a former assistant secretary of agriculture now at the Consumer Federation of America.
U.S. agricultural exports to China have grown to more than $5 billion a year - a fraction of last year's $232 billion U.S. trade deficit with China but a number that has enormous growth potential, given the Chinese economy's 10 percent growth rate and its billion-plus consumers.
And for some products they have had little choice, as China has driven competitors out of business with its rock-bottom prices.
But after the pet food scandal, some are recalculating.
"This isn't the first time we've had an incident from a Chinese supplier," said Pat Verduin, a senior vice president at the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a trade group in Washington. "Food safety is integral to brands and to companies. This is not an issue the industry is taking lightly."
New Focus on the Problem
China's less-than-stellar behavior as a food exporter is revealed in stomach-turning detail in FDA "refusal reports" filed by U.S. inspectors: Juices and fruits rejected as "filthy." Prunes tinted with chemical dyes not approved for human consumption. Frozen breaded shrimp preserved with nitrofuran, an antibacterial that can cause cancer. Swordfish rejected as "poisonous."
In the first four months of 2007, FDA inspectors - who are able to check out less than 1 percent of regulated imports - refused 298 food shipments from China. By contrast, 56 shipments from Canada were rejected, even though Canada exports about $10 billion in FDA-regulated food and agricultural products to the United States - compared to about $2 billion from China.
Although China is subject to more inspections because of its poor record, those figures mean that the rejection rate for foods imported from China, on a dollar-for-dollar basis, is more than 25 times that for Canada.
Miao Changxia, of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said China "attaches great importance" to the pet food debacle. "Investigations were immediately carried out ... and a host of emergency measures have been taken to ensure the hygiene and safety of exported plant-origin protein products," she said in an e-mail.
But deception by Chinese exporters is not limited to plant products, and some of their most egregiously unfit exports are smuggled into the United States.
Under Agriculture Department rules, countries cannot export meat and poultry products to the United States unless the USDA certifies that the slaughterhouses and processing plants have food-safety systems equivalent to those here. Much to its frustration, China is not certified to sell any meat to the United States because it has not met that requirement.
But that has not stopped Chinese meat exporters. In the past year, USDA teams have seized hundreds of thousands of pounds of prohibited poultry products from China and other Asian countries, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns announced in March. Some were shipped in crates labeled "dried lily flower," "prune slices" and "vegetables," according to news reports. It is unclear how much of the illegal meat slipped in undetected.
Despite those violations, the Chinese government is on track to get permission to legally export its chickens to the United States - a prospect that has raised concern not only because of fears of bacteria such as salmonella but also because Chinese chickens, if not properly processed, could be a source of avian flu, which public-health authorities fear may be poised to trigger a human pandemic.
Last year, under high-level pressure from China, the USDA passed a rule allowing China to export to the United States chickens that were grown and slaughtered in North America and then processed in China - a rule that quickly passed through multiple levels of review and was approved the day before Chinese President Hu Jintao arrived in Washington last April.
"It's not being facilitated or accelerated through the system at all," Raymond said of the chicken rule, adding that permission for China to sell poultry to the United States is moving ahead because recent USDA audits found China's poultry slaughterhouses to be equivalent to those here.
Tony Corbo, a lobbyist for Food and Water Watch, a Washington advocacy group, said that finding - which is not subject to outside review - is unbelievable, given repeated findings of unsanitary conditions at China's chicken slaughterhouses. Corbo said he has seen some of those audits. "Everyone who has seen them was grossed out," he said.
An Official Response
For a growing number of important food products, China has become virtually the only source in the world.
China controls 80 percent of the world's production of ascorbic acid, for example, a valuable preservative that is ubiquitous in processed and other foods. Only one producer remains in the United States, Hubbard said.
"That's true of a lot of ingredients," he said, including the wheat gluten that was initially thought to be the cause of the pet deaths. Virtually none of it is made in the United States, because the Chinese sell it for less than it would cost U.S. manufacturers to make it.
So pervasive is the U.S. hunger for cheap imports, experts said, that the executive branch itself has repeatedly rebuffed proposals by agency scientists to impose even modest new safety rules for foreign foods.
"Sometimes guidances can get through, but not regulations," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group. Guidances, which the FDA defines as "current thinking on a particular subject," are not binding.
Under the Bush administration in particular, DeWaal said, if a proposed regulation does get past agency or department heads, it hits the wall at the White House Office of Management and Budget.
John C. Bailar III, a University of Chicago professor emeritus who chaired a 2003 National Academies committee that recommended major changes in the U.S. food safety system - which have gone largely unheeded - said he has become increasingly concerned that corporations and the federal government seem willing to put the interests of business "above the public welfare."
"This nation has - and has had for decades - a pressing need for a wholly dedicated food safety agency, one that is independent and not concerned with other matters ... to bring together and extend the bits of food safety activities now scattered over more than a dozen agencies," he said in an e-mail.
Legislation to create such an agency was recently introduced, though many suspect that is too big a challenge politically.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Anguish
Stop The Killing
"Our Voices Have Been Lost"
By Deanie Mills
"What good does it do to speak out if nothing changes? Our voices have been lost."
Those words are made all the more wrenching by the fact that they were spoken in tears by retired officer Andrew Bacevich, Vietnam vet, graduate of West Point, freqent and outspoken critic of the Iraq War, on the death of his beloved son, Andrew, a 1st Lt. killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq on Mother's Day.
I could identify quite powerfully with Mr. Bacevich, who now teaches at Boston University. For one thing, his family has a long and proud tradition of military service, as does mine. He is a combat vet who has spoken out against this war from the beginning, and while I'm not a vet, I'm in a family surrounded by them, and I, too, spoke out even when it caused problems within my own family--even my own marriage. And yet, his son went to that same war, as did mine.
I understood exactly what Mr. Bacevich meant when he mentioned that he never did "burden" his son with his views on the war while he was in uniform and especially while deployed, because "he had enough on his mind." I am quite sure that his son was just as aware as mine on how his dad felt, but they respected one another deeply, as do my son and I.
When these guys are deployed, they don't need to hear about how badly the war is going--they can see it up-close and personal. They don't want to hear how badly the administration is handling strategy and tactics--they deal with it every day. As my son said once from a quick sat-phone call home from the Anbar, "We're fighting an unconventional war with conventional tactics and it's not working."
When they call home, they're under unimaginable stress and are so exhausted they can hardly speak, frustrated and angry and depressed, and all they want to hear is how their old dog is doing, how the family is, whether the bluebonnets are yet in bloom.
It is a terrible, awful feeling to hate this war and to love our warriors who go fight it.
We are wracked each and every day by the same terrors and anxieties as those who support the war, but we can't comfort ourselves with the platitudes that our loved ones are fighting for our freedom, or "fighting them over there so we won't have to fight them over here"--because we just don't believe it.
Our deepest, most profound fear is that we will lose our loved one for a wasted cause.
And it happened to Andrew Bacevich. I am devastated for him and for his family, and his words haunt me.
Yesterday, the San Francisco Gate ran a story I have yet to see on mainstream media:
The Bush administration is quietly on track to nearly double the number of combat troops in Iraq this year, an analysis of Pentagon deployment orders showed Monday.
The little-noticed second surge, designed to reinforce U.S. troops in Iraq, is being executed by sending more combat brigades and extending tours of duty for troops already there.
The actions could boost the number of combat soldiers from 52,500 in early January to as many as 98,000 by the end of this year if the Pentagon overlaps arriving and departing combat brigades.
Separately, when additional support troops are included in this second troop increase, the total number of U.S. troops inIraq could increase from 162,000 now to more than 200,000--a record high number by the end of this year.
The Army spokesman acted as if this were no big deal, just an overlap of troops, like how my son's unit would remain in-country for two weeks or so after the rtheir biggest problems were likely to be.
It is, of course, another smooth lie. Yes, there will be overlaps, but if those "overlaps" go on for months; if the in-place troops have their tours extended for months longer after the new guys have arrived, then you've got an escalation.
I got the impression from the Army guy's comments that he believes we are finally sending the troops to this war that were needed from the beginning and basically, finally fighting it the way it SHOULD be fought.
That's all well and good, maybe, four years ago.
But it's too late, now. Stand in the middle of a fire ant bed and try to stomp out all the ants. When you are stung nearly to death, call over some friends and see if they can help you. You can kill a lot of ants, but you will not destroy that ant bed.
Congress seems so incapable of working around a deaf, dumb, and blind commander-in-chief that my active-duty son has actually said he's so frustrated at all the Congressional arguing accomplishing nothing that he's beginning to understand those people who wanted to move to another country when Bush was elected.
I get really angry at those on the left who assume that all the troops support this war. THEY DON'T. More and more of them WANT IT TO END, and they are counting on us--civilians, and Congress--to do what their commander-in-chief and generals won't do.
Because if we don't, more of them are going to die, and nobody knows that better than those in the military and their famiies.
Just ask Andrew Bacevich.
My son's own Marine Corps unit was promised that they would not have to return for a FOURTH deployment, but that promise was broken and now they're scheduled to deploy on the same day that Dustin is due to get out of the Marines. We have no way of knowing if they will actually LET HIM GO or not. After all, he's a combat-hardened NCO and those are increasingly becoming in shorter and shorter supply.
In the meantime, his buddies, and the sons of my friends, are facing another tour in hell. And there is not a damn thing they can do about it if they don't want to go to jail.
Bush is bound and determined to maintain the current so-called "strategy" until he leaves office, and he does not care how many more men and women are massacred over there.
We speak out, our voices grow to a thundering chorus, we exercise our power to make change at the ballot box and bring in those we have entrusted to end this war...and nothing changes.
I'm looking for hope. I'm DESPERATE for hope.
If any of you think there is any, I'd like to hear it.
We'd ALL like to hear it!
_______________________________________
House Liberals To Jump Ship On Iraq Funding.
Many House liberals will reportedly vote No on the upcoming Iraq bill, which will be stripped of timetables and benchmarks. "A lot of people have bought into the notion that you have to fund the troops," said Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), who has voted for the previous versions. "Funding the troops means more troops are going to die."
_______________________________________
Senator Russ Feingold's diary :: ::
This situation is a collapse for Democrats. We had a strong start, pushed back against the President’s failed policy and held our ground that the supplemental should include binding language to end the war. But now, as Congress gets ready to send the President a bill that does nothing to get our troops out of Iraq, we are just folding our cards. As one person commented under Greg Sargent’s great post at TPM cafe, "Send the Congressional Dems over to my place for some poker - I could use a windfall right now."
This is no time to back down. This fight to end the war isn’t something that we can just put off or kick down the road. As mcjoan pointed out, it doesn’t make any sense to wait until this "mythical September" when Republicans will suddenly decide that we need to get out of Iraq. Why should this wait until September? First Americans had to put up with a Republican Congress that did nothing, and now we are faced with a Democratic Congress that is giving the President exactly what he wants – continuing his failed policy and leaving our troops stuck in the middle of a civil war. Some strategy. We can’t back down when the stakes are so high. I know you’ll keep ratcheting up the pressure, and that’s exactly what we need right now. Now is the time to be pulling out all the stops to end the war.
UPDATE:
Thanks everyone for your supportive words and thoughtful questions. I know a lot of you want to know what more you can do to "ratchet up the pressure." I agree with Edgar08 who says that in order to ratchet up pressure on the President, Dems themselves need to keep feeling the pressure. I heard stories this week about Senators who voted last week against Feingold-Reid, went back home to their states over the weekend, and then got an earful from constituents tired of inaction on the war. I guarantee you that your elected leaders are hearing you and it does make a difference.
To answer those of you who asked if I would support a supplemental without binding language to end the war, the answer is no. I think this conference report is an affront to the will of the American people and does nothing to help change course in Iraq.
I also agree with those of you who think we should have sent the same bill, or a similar bill, right back to the President. Congress should have stood strong, acknowledged the will of the American people, and insisted on a bill requiring a real change of course in Iraq.
To those of you who want to know what I plan to do next, I am already looking for the next opportunity to push the Feingold-Reid legislation. We’re expecting to take up a defense bill in the floor period following the Memorial Day recess, and that may be the best opportunity to keep pressing the Senate to get on the right side of history and end this war.
Thanks again, everyone
_______________________________________
Did you see the News Hour with Jim Lehear on Tuesday?
The real cost of the war? Estimated to be 2 to 3 TRILLION DOLLARS. The war is costing about 200 billion a year now, that amount of money would repair every school in America.The cost of rebuilding the Armies equipment about 500 billion, the cost of taking care of wounded soldiers for life will be at least 600 billion. One poor guy shown in a sling will cost 250 thousand a year for life. You get the picture. Then there are pensions for those severly wounded another 500 billion and on it goes.
_______________________________________
Carter Blasts Bush on His Global Impact
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Former President Carter says President Bush's administration is "the worst in history" in international relations, taking aim at the White House's policy of pre-emptive war and its Middle East diplomacy.
The criticism from Carter, which a biographer says is unprecedented for the 39th president, also took aim at Bush's environmental policies and the administration's "quite disturbing" faith-based initiative funding.
"I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history," Carter told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a story that appeared in the newspaper's Saturday editions. "The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me."
Carter came down hard on the Iraq war.
"We now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war where we go to war with another nation militarily, even though our own security is not directly threatened, if we want to change the regime there or if we fear that some time in the future our security might be endangered," he said. "But that's been a radical departure from all previous administration policies."
Carter, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, criticized Bush for having "zero peace talks" in Israel. Carter also said the administration "abandoned or directly refuted" every negotiated nuclear arms agreement, as well as environmental efforts by other presidents.
Carter also offered a harsh assessment for the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which helped religious charities receive $2.15 billion in federal grants in fiscal year 2005 alone.
"The policy from the White House has been to allocate funds to religious institutions, even those that channel those funds exclusively to their own particular group of believers in a particular religion," Carter said. "As a traditional Baptist, I've always believed in separation of church and state and honored that premise when I was president, and so have all other presidents, I might say, except this one."
Douglas Brinkley, a Tulane University presidential historian and Carter biographer, described Carter's comments as unprecedented.
"This is the most forceful denunciation President Carter has ever made about an American president," Brinkley said. "When you call somebody the worst president, that's volatile. Those are fighting words."
Carter also lashed out Saturday at British prime minister Tony Blair. Asked how he would judge Blair's support of Bush, the former president said: "Abominable. Loyal. Blind. Apparently subservient."
"And I think the almost undeviating support by Great Britain for the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq have been a major tragedy for the world," Carter told British Broadcasting Corp. radio.
"Our Voices Have Been Lost"
By Deanie Mills
"What good does it do to speak out if nothing changes? Our voices have been lost."
Those words are made all the more wrenching by the fact that they were spoken in tears by retired officer Andrew Bacevich, Vietnam vet, graduate of West Point, freqent and outspoken critic of the Iraq War, on the death of his beloved son, Andrew, a 1st Lt. killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq on Mother's Day.
I could identify quite powerfully with Mr. Bacevich, who now teaches at Boston University. For one thing, his family has a long and proud tradition of military service, as does mine. He is a combat vet who has spoken out against this war from the beginning, and while I'm not a vet, I'm in a family surrounded by them, and I, too, spoke out even when it caused problems within my own family--even my own marriage. And yet, his son went to that same war, as did mine.
I understood exactly what Mr. Bacevich meant when he mentioned that he never did "burden" his son with his views on the war while he was in uniform and especially while deployed, because "he had enough on his mind." I am quite sure that his son was just as aware as mine on how his dad felt, but they respected one another deeply, as do my son and I.
When these guys are deployed, they don't need to hear about how badly the war is going--they can see it up-close and personal. They don't want to hear how badly the administration is handling strategy and tactics--they deal with it every day. As my son said once from a quick sat-phone call home from the Anbar, "We're fighting an unconventional war with conventional tactics and it's not working."
When they call home, they're under unimaginable stress and are so exhausted they can hardly speak, frustrated and angry and depressed, and all they want to hear is how their old dog is doing, how the family is, whether the bluebonnets are yet in bloom.
It is a terrible, awful feeling to hate this war and to love our warriors who go fight it.
We are wracked each and every day by the same terrors and anxieties as those who support the war, but we can't comfort ourselves with the platitudes that our loved ones are fighting for our freedom, or "fighting them over there so we won't have to fight them over here"--because we just don't believe it.
Our deepest, most profound fear is that we will lose our loved one for a wasted cause.
And it happened to Andrew Bacevich. I am devastated for him and for his family, and his words haunt me.
Yesterday, the San Francisco Gate ran a story I have yet to see on mainstream media:
The Bush administration is quietly on track to nearly double the number of combat troops in Iraq this year, an analysis of Pentagon deployment orders showed Monday.
The little-noticed second surge, designed to reinforce U.S. troops in Iraq, is being executed by sending more combat brigades and extending tours of duty for troops already there.
The actions could boost the number of combat soldiers from 52,500 in early January to as many as 98,000 by the end of this year if the Pentagon overlaps arriving and departing combat brigades.
Separately, when additional support troops are included in this second troop increase, the total number of U.S. troops inIraq could increase from 162,000 now to more than 200,000--a record high number by the end of this year.
The Army spokesman acted as if this were no big deal, just an overlap of troops, like how my son's unit would remain in-country for two weeks or so after the rtheir biggest problems were likely to be.
It is, of course, another smooth lie. Yes, there will be overlaps, but if those "overlaps" go on for months; if the in-place troops have their tours extended for months longer after the new guys have arrived, then you've got an escalation.
I got the impression from the Army guy's comments that he believes we are finally sending the troops to this war that were needed from the beginning and basically, finally fighting it the way it SHOULD be fought.
That's all well and good, maybe, four years ago.
But it's too late, now. Stand in the middle of a fire ant bed and try to stomp out all the ants. When you are stung nearly to death, call over some friends and see if they can help you. You can kill a lot of ants, but you will not destroy that ant bed.
Congress seems so incapable of working around a deaf, dumb, and blind commander-in-chief that my active-duty son has actually said he's so frustrated at all the Congressional arguing accomplishing nothing that he's beginning to understand those people who wanted to move to another country when Bush was elected.
I get really angry at those on the left who assume that all the troops support this war. THEY DON'T. More and more of them WANT IT TO END, and they are counting on us--civilians, and Congress--to do what their commander-in-chief and generals won't do.
Because if we don't, more of them are going to die, and nobody knows that better than those in the military and their famiies.
Just ask Andrew Bacevich.
My son's own Marine Corps unit was promised that they would not have to return for a FOURTH deployment, but that promise was broken and now they're scheduled to deploy on the same day that Dustin is due to get out of the Marines. We have no way of knowing if they will actually LET HIM GO or not. After all, he's a combat-hardened NCO and those are increasingly becoming in shorter and shorter supply.
In the meantime, his buddies, and the sons of my friends, are facing another tour in hell. And there is not a damn thing they can do about it if they don't want to go to jail.
Bush is bound and determined to maintain the current so-called "strategy" until he leaves office, and he does not care how many more men and women are massacred over there.
We speak out, our voices grow to a thundering chorus, we exercise our power to make change at the ballot box and bring in those we have entrusted to end this war...and nothing changes.
I'm looking for hope. I'm DESPERATE for hope.
If any of you think there is any, I'd like to hear it.
We'd ALL like to hear it!
_______________________________________
House Liberals To Jump Ship On Iraq Funding.
Many House liberals will reportedly vote No on the upcoming Iraq bill, which will be stripped of timetables and benchmarks. "A lot of people have bought into the notion that you have to fund the troops," said Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), who has voted for the previous versions. "Funding the troops means more troops are going to die."
_______________________________________
Senator Russ Feingold's diary :: ::
This situation is a collapse for Democrats. We had a strong start, pushed back against the President’s failed policy and held our ground that the supplemental should include binding language to end the war. But now, as Congress gets ready to send the President a bill that does nothing to get our troops out of Iraq, we are just folding our cards. As one person commented under Greg Sargent’s great post at TPM cafe, "Send the Congressional Dems over to my place for some poker - I could use a windfall right now."
This is no time to back down. This fight to end the war isn’t something that we can just put off or kick down the road. As mcjoan pointed out, it doesn’t make any sense to wait until this "mythical September" when Republicans will suddenly decide that we need to get out of Iraq. Why should this wait until September? First Americans had to put up with a Republican Congress that did nothing, and now we are faced with a Democratic Congress that is giving the President exactly what he wants – continuing his failed policy and leaving our troops stuck in the middle of a civil war. Some strategy. We can’t back down when the stakes are so high. I know you’ll keep ratcheting up the pressure, and that’s exactly what we need right now. Now is the time to be pulling out all the stops to end the war.
UPDATE:
Thanks everyone for your supportive words and thoughtful questions. I know a lot of you want to know what more you can do to "ratchet up the pressure." I agree with Edgar08 who says that in order to ratchet up pressure on the President, Dems themselves need to keep feeling the pressure. I heard stories this week about Senators who voted last week against Feingold-Reid, went back home to their states over the weekend, and then got an earful from constituents tired of inaction on the war. I guarantee you that your elected leaders are hearing you and it does make a difference.
To answer those of you who asked if I would support a supplemental without binding language to end the war, the answer is no. I think this conference report is an affront to the will of the American people and does nothing to help change course in Iraq.
I also agree with those of you who think we should have sent the same bill, or a similar bill, right back to the President. Congress should have stood strong, acknowledged the will of the American people, and insisted on a bill requiring a real change of course in Iraq.
To those of you who want to know what I plan to do next, I am already looking for the next opportunity to push the Feingold-Reid legislation. We’re expecting to take up a defense bill in the floor period following the Memorial Day recess, and that may be the best opportunity to keep pressing the Senate to get on the right side of history and end this war.
Thanks again, everyone
_______________________________________
Did you see the News Hour with Jim Lehear on Tuesday?
The real cost of the war? Estimated to be 2 to 3 TRILLION DOLLARS. The war is costing about 200 billion a year now, that amount of money would repair every school in America.The cost of rebuilding the Armies equipment about 500 billion, the cost of taking care of wounded soldiers for life will be at least 600 billion. One poor guy shown in a sling will cost 250 thousand a year for life. You get the picture. Then there are pensions for those severly wounded another 500 billion and on it goes.
_______________________________________
Carter Blasts Bush on His Global Impact
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Former President Carter says President Bush's administration is "the worst in history" in international relations, taking aim at the White House's policy of pre-emptive war and its Middle East diplomacy.
The criticism from Carter, which a biographer says is unprecedented for the 39th president, also took aim at Bush's environmental policies and the administration's "quite disturbing" faith-based initiative funding.
"I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history," Carter told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a story that appeared in the newspaper's Saturday editions. "The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me."
Carter came down hard on the Iraq war.
"We now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war where we go to war with another nation militarily, even though our own security is not directly threatened, if we want to change the regime there or if we fear that some time in the future our security might be endangered," he said. "But that's been a radical departure from all previous administration policies."
Carter, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, criticized Bush for having "zero peace talks" in Israel. Carter also said the administration "abandoned or directly refuted" every negotiated nuclear arms agreement, as well as environmental efforts by other presidents.
Carter also offered a harsh assessment for the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which helped religious charities receive $2.15 billion in federal grants in fiscal year 2005 alone.
"The policy from the White House has been to allocate funds to religious institutions, even those that channel those funds exclusively to their own particular group of believers in a particular religion," Carter said. "As a traditional Baptist, I've always believed in separation of church and state and honored that premise when I was president, and so have all other presidents, I might say, except this one."
Douglas Brinkley, a Tulane University presidential historian and Carter biographer, described Carter's comments as unprecedented.
"This is the most forceful denunciation President Carter has ever made about an American president," Brinkley said. "When you call somebody the worst president, that's volatile. Those are fighting words."
Carter also lashed out Saturday at British prime minister Tony Blair. Asked how he would judge Blair's support of Bush, the former president said: "Abominable. Loyal. Blind. Apparently subservient."
"And I think the almost undeviating support by Great Britain for the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq have been a major tragedy for the world," Carter told British Broadcasting Corp. radio.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Bush
I knew as soon as I read in The Guardian yesterday that the story about what Iran is doing in Iraq(Iran's plan for offensive to force US out of Iraq), was more Bush Administration Bullshit. It's what they said about Iraq to get us into this war. I can't understand why the media can't see through this administrations lies and other propaganda.
"Buying the War," Part II - Now It's Iran By Will Bunch The New York Daily News
Monday 21 May 2007
You would think that after after all the official and unofficial lies that came out of the Washington spin machine during the 2002-03 run-up to the war in Iraq, newspapers would be a little more skeptical about similarly unsupported, high-level but anonymous and bellicose allegations about Iran (or anyone else).
And you would doubly think that about a newspaper that, day in and day out, is one of the best in the world: Britain's Guardian.
You'd think...but you would be wrong:
Iran is secretly forging ties with al-Qaida elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces intended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal, US officials say.
"Iran is fighting a proxy war in Iraq and it's a very dangerous course for them to be following. They are already committing daily acts of war against US and British forces," a senior US official in Baghdad warned. "They [Iran] are behind a lot of high-profile attacks meant to undermine US will and British will, such as the rocket attacks on Basra palace and the Green Zone [in Baghdad]. The attacks are directed by the Revolutionary Guard who are connected right to the top [of the Iranian government]."
The story does have another source - another anonymous U.S. official, but in Washington:
"Tehran is behaving like a racecourse gambler. They're betting on all the horses in the race, even on people they fundamentally don't trust," a senior administration official in Washington said. "They don't know what the outcome will be in Iraq. So they're hedging their bets."
Boo! Scared yet?
Look, I think that reporting of the Iraq crisis should be as aggressive as possible, and that obviously includes talking to American officials in Washington and in Baghdad. And, the situation in the region has become quite volatile since our decision to invade it, and no doubt Iran is a player, but...
I can also tell you as a journalist with 26 years of experience behind me that this story is the biggest load of crap - and that's not a phrase I would use loosely - I've ever seen in my life. Two unnamed government officials as sources, and a perfunctary denial from an Iranian officials in the last paragraph - and that's it?
This is a stunning allegation - so stunning because it really makes no sense. Iran's government does have close ties with some of Iraq's Shiite leaders that we also seem to be propping up these days, but it is the bitter enemy of the Sunni forces that these unnamed Bush spinmeisters now claim they are also supporting. If such a bizarre reversal had taken place, and I were to write a story about it, I would be sure to talk to outside experts on the region and to non-U.S. government sources - and quite them by name - to prove such an unlikely premise was in fact true.
That did not happen. And in fact, the story is so "out there" that it would be best ignored - except that you can't ignore it. For one thing, it's highlighted on the Drudge Report, and since Matt Drudge rules the world of Beltway media, it's going to become part of the public discourse. Also, in spite of its lack of even truthiness, let alone truth, it does prove - just like the top-selling "Christian book" calling for an American jihad against Tehran - the lengths that some of our leaders are still willing to go in formenting Armageddon.
But the fact that one of the world's better newspapers was willing to play along - or that my own colleagues in the mainstream media seem to never learn - is the saddest development of all. Didn't anyone watch "Buying the War"?
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"Buying the War," Part II - Now It's Iran By Will Bunch The New York Daily News
Monday 21 May 2007
You would think that after after all the official and unofficial lies that came out of the Washington spin machine during the 2002-03 run-up to the war in Iraq, newspapers would be a little more skeptical about similarly unsupported, high-level but anonymous and bellicose allegations about Iran (or anyone else).
And you would doubly think that about a newspaper that, day in and day out, is one of the best in the world: Britain's Guardian.
You'd think...but you would be wrong:
Iran is secretly forging ties with al-Qaida elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces intended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal, US officials say.
"Iran is fighting a proxy war in Iraq and it's a very dangerous course for them to be following. They are already committing daily acts of war against US and British forces," a senior US official in Baghdad warned. "They [Iran] are behind a lot of high-profile attacks meant to undermine US will and British will, such as the rocket attacks on Basra palace and the Green Zone [in Baghdad]. The attacks are directed by the Revolutionary Guard who are connected right to the top [of the Iranian government]."
The story does have another source - another anonymous U.S. official, but in Washington:
"Tehran is behaving like a racecourse gambler. They're betting on all the horses in the race, even on people they fundamentally don't trust," a senior administration official in Washington said. "They don't know what the outcome will be in Iraq. So they're hedging their bets."
Boo! Scared yet?
Look, I think that reporting of the Iraq crisis should be as aggressive as possible, and that obviously includes talking to American officials in Washington and in Baghdad. And, the situation in the region has become quite volatile since our decision to invade it, and no doubt Iran is a player, but...
I can also tell you as a journalist with 26 years of experience behind me that this story is the biggest load of crap - and that's not a phrase I would use loosely - I've ever seen in my life. Two unnamed government officials as sources, and a perfunctary denial from an Iranian officials in the last paragraph - and that's it?
This is a stunning allegation - so stunning because it really makes no sense. Iran's government does have close ties with some of Iraq's Shiite leaders that we also seem to be propping up these days, but it is the bitter enemy of the Sunni forces that these unnamed Bush spinmeisters now claim they are also supporting. If such a bizarre reversal had taken place, and I were to write a story about it, I would be sure to talk to outside experts on the region and to non-U.S. government sources - and quite them by name - to prove such an unlikely premise was in fact true.
That did not happen. And in fact, the story is so "out there" that it would be best ignored - except that you can't ignore it. For one thing, it's highlighted on the Drudge Report, and since Matt Drudge rules the world of Beltway media, it's going to become part of the public discourse. Also, in spite of its lack of even truthiness, let alone truth, it does prove - just like the top-selling "Christian book" calling for an American jihad against Tehran - the lengths that some of our leaders are still willing to go in formenting Armageddon.
But the fact that one of the world's better newspapers was willing to play along - or that my own colleagues in the mainstream media seem to never learn - is the saddest development of all. Didn't anyone watch "Buying the War"?
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Snow v. Gore
Post:
Q This is not asking you for a book review, but Al Gore's new book is out( The Assualt on Reason), and he says that Saddam Hussein posed no threat and that President Bush, "forged evidence that Hussein was seeking to develop atomic bombs."
MR. SNOW: Well, the second is false, and the first is in contradiction to Senator Gore -- then Vice President Gore's prior statements. So I'll let him rectify those differences.
Riposte:
[Mr. Gore, in a conference call with bloggers today: "Unlike the President's State of the Union, this book was actually fact-checked.
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The Man Who Would Be King!
Bush Anoints Himself as the Insurer of Constitutional Government in Emergency
By Matthew Rothschild
May 18, 2007
With scarcely a mention in the mainstream media, President Bush has ordered up a plan for responding to a catastrophic attack.
In a new National Security Presidential Directive, Bush lays out his plans for dealing with a “catastrophic emergency.”
Under that plan, he entrusts himself with leading the entire federal government, not just the Executive Branch. And he gives himself the responsibility “for ensuring constitutional government.”
He laid this all out in a document entitled “National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51” and ;ldquo;Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20.”
The White House released it on May 9.
Other than a discussion on Daily Kos led off by a posting by Leo Fender, and a pro-forma notice in a couple of mainstream newspapers, this document has gone unremarked upon.
The subject of the document is entitled “National Continuity Policy.”
It defines a “catastrophic emergency” as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function.”
This could mean another 9/11, or another Katrina, or a major earthquake in California, I imagine, since it says it would include “localized acts of nature, accidents, and technological or attack-related emergencies.”
The document emphasizes the need to ensure “the continued function of our form of government under the Constitution, including the functioning of the three separate branches of government,” it states.
But it says flat out: “The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government.”
The document waves at the need to work closely with the other two branches, saying there will be “a cooperative effort among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Federal Government.” But this effort will be “coordinated by the President, as a matter of comity with respect to the legislative and judicialbranches and with proper respect for the constitutional separation of powers.”
Among the efforts coordinated by the President would ensuring the capability of the three branches of government to “provide for orderly succession” and “appropriate transition of leadership.”
The document designates a National Continuity Coordinator, who would be the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism.
Currently holding that post is Frances Fragos Townsend.
She is required to develop a National Continuity Implementation Plan and submit it within 90 days.
As part of that plan, she is not only to devise procedures for the Executive Branch but also give guidance to “state, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure.”
The secretary of Homeland Security is also directed to develop planning guidance for “private sector critical infrastructure owners and operators,” as well as state, local, territorial, and tribal governments.
The document gives the Vice President a role in implementing the provisions of the contingency plans.
“This directive shall be implanted in a manner that is consistent with, and facilitates effective implementation of, provisions of the Constitution concerning succession to the Presidency or the exercise of its powers, and the Presidential Succession Act of 1947 (3 USC 19), with the consultation of the Vice President and, as appropriate, others involved.”
The document also contains “classified Continuity Annexes.
Let us hope we don't have another disaster while Bush is president as he would then declare himself the only government!
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By Barba
May 23, 2007 at 01:56:32 AM PDT
I was recently struck by how often I see the phrase, "the deadliest month since," when reading about Iraq, and wondered, how much longer will we allow this madness to continue? And yesterday I read that:
Democrats gave up their demand for troop-withdrawal deadlines in an Iraq war spending package yesterday, abandoning their top goal of bringing U.S. troops home and handing President Bush a victory in a debate that has roiled Congress for months.
Any meaningful action to bring George Bush's misbegotten war to an end is out...well, except periodic reports on progress. But we all know how George Bush measures progress. Why, it was less than six months ago that he stated unequivocably about Iraq that:
Absolutely, we're winning.
So as House Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid work to "hammer out a final agreement" that merely requires Bush to report on his version of progress, now seems like a good time for a reminder about how another kind of progress in Iraq has played out, starting six months after the mission was accomplished:
November was the deadliest month yet for the American military in Iraq. - November 2003
The deadliest month for U.S. troops in Iraq ended Friday with 137 servicemembers having lost their lives. - April 2004
The U.S. military in Iraq suffered its deadliest month since last year's invasion with more military personnel killed in action in November than in any equivalent period, the Pentagon's figures show. - November 2004
This month, 60 US troops have been killed - 10 in the past three days - making May the deadliest month for the US military since January. - May 2005
That brought to 94 the number of American troops killed in Iraq in October, the deadliest month for Americans since January 2005. - October 2005
An American soldier was killed in a roadside bombing north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said Friday, making April the deadliest month for American forces in Iraq this year. - April 2006
Three U.S. Marines also were killed, making October the deadliest month for American forces this year. - October 2006
Five more US troops were killed in Iraq, the military said, making December the year's deadliest month for US troops with the toll reaching 108. - December 2006
April April was the deadliest month for the U.S. military so far this year, with 102 personnel killed in action. - April 2007
Yesterday Reid said:
For heaven's sake, look where we've come. It's a lot more than the president ever expected he'd have to agree to.
And how is the White House describing the deal?
MR. SNOW: What will be seen as a victory is providing, through the end of the fiscal year, the funding and flexibility the forces need. That's what we've wanted all along.
What they've wanted all along. And just the other day I read that May is on pace to be "the deadliest month since"
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Tuesday, May 22, 2007
CAVING IN!!!!!!!!! With A Blank Check!
Dems Set War Bill Without Iraq Timeline
DAVID ESPO AP May 21, 2007
WASHINGTON — In grudging concessions to President Bush, Democrats intend to draft an Iraq war-funding bill without a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and shorn of at least some of the billions they want for domestic programs, officials said Monday.
The legislation would include the first federal minimum wage increase in more than a decade, a top priority for the Democrats who took control of Congress in January, the officials added.
While details remain subject to change, the measure is designed to close the books by Friday on a bruising struggle between Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress over the war. It would provide funds for military operations in Iraq through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.
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Smithsonian Accused of Altering Exhibit
BRETT ZONGKER AP May 21, 2007
WASHINGTON — The Smithsonian Institution toned down an exhibit on climate change in the Arctic for fear of angering Congress and the Bush administration, says a former administrator at the museum.
Among other things, the script, or official text, of last year's exhibit was rewritten to minimize and inject more uncertainty into the relationship between global warming and humans, said Robert Sullivan, who was associate director in charge of exhibitions at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.
Also, officials omitted scientists' interpretation of some research and let visitors draw their own conclusions from the data, he said. In addition, graphs were altered "to show that global warming could go either way," Sullivan said.
"It just became tooth-pulling to get solid science out without toning it down," said Sullivan, who resigned last fall after 16 years at the museum. He said he left after higher-ups tried to reassign him.
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Dems Set War Bill Without Iraq Timeline
DAVID ESPO AP May 21, 2007
WASHINGTON — In grudging concessions to President Bush, Democrats intend to draft an Iraq war-funding bill without a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and shorn of at least some of the billions they want for domestic programs, officials said Monday.
The legislation would include the first federal minimum wage increase in more than a decade, a top priority for the Democrats who took control of Congress in January, the officials added.
While details remain subject to change, the measure is designed to close the books by Friday on a bruising struggle between Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress over the war. It would provide funds for military operations in Iraq through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.
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Smithsonian Accused of Altering Exhibit
BRETT ZONGKER AP May 21, 2007
WASHINGTON — The Smithsonian Institution toned down an exhibit on climate change in the Arctic for fear of angering Congress and the Bush administration, says a former administrator at the museum.
Among other things, the script, or official text, of last year's exhibit was rewritten to minimize and inject more uncertainty into the relationship between global warming and humans, said Robert Sullivan, who was associate director in charge of exhibitions at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.
Also, officials omitted scientists' interpretation of some research and let visitors draw their own conclusions from the data, he said. In addition, graphs were altered "to show that global warming could go either way," Sullivan said.
"It just became tooth-pulling to get solid science out without toning it down," said Sullivan, who resigned last fall after 16 years at the museum. He said he left after higher-ups tried to reassign him.
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Quote Of The Day
"Bill Clinton is the most popular person on Earth."
-- Former Clinton adviser and current commentator Paul Begala, talking just now on CNN about Bill's poll numbers relative to those of other global figures.
Hey maybe Hilary can win if she has Bill as her VP running mate!
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The user's guide to Gore fever
By: Ben Smith May 21, 2007 01:39 PM EST
Pros
Gore is one of the very few people in America who could enter the presidential contest as late as he wants without immediately facing the impossibility of raising the tens of millions of dollars required to get his message out.
That's partly because Gore could seed a campaign with his new personal wealth, earned in part by getting on the Google bandwagon well before the company went public. It's also because, as the Associated Press reported, a class of America's richest donors -- the Silicon Valley elite, led by Apple's Steve Jobs -- are keeping their financial powder dry for their new friend, the former vice president.
"Al's the guy," Jobs told Time.
Gore also has an organization waiting in the wings. His early opposition to the Iraq war built him deep new ties to the online activist group MoveOn, which has grown into one of the party's most powerful constituencies.
"Al Gore really hit the trifecta for our members -- speaking out boldly on Iraq, climate, torture and media issues like Net neutrality before it was cool to do so," said MoveOn's executive director, Eli Pariser. "In 2003 and 2004, our members were looking for bold progressive leadership, and Gore has really demonstrated what that looked like."
As for a launch date? Well, Gore is considered a serious contender for the Nobel -- in part because the electors in Oslo presumably would delight in sticking a finger in President Bush's eye. The prize will be announced, conveniently, in mid-October and awarded Dec. 10.
The polls back up the notion that Gore would be an instant contender in the Democratic primaries. In a USA Today/Gallup poll earlier this month, he registered the support of 14 percent of Democrats, less than Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois but more than former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina. Not bad for a guy who isn't running.
"People who aren't in the race tend to do less well in the horse race than people who are in the race in a field full of popular people," said the Democratic pollster Mark Mellmam.
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Should Bush Be Impeached?
Go over to MSNBC and vote. 429,860 votes so far with 88% saying yes.
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Monday, May 21, 2007
Anchored By Oil
Seven US Soldiers Die in Iraq Attacks
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With New Embassy, US Presense In Iraq seems Permanent
Ameerica On the Tigris
One building that's been built on time and on budget in Iraq: America's fortress embassy
· Vatican-sized bomb-proof structure to cost $750 Million· Builders in Green Zone already insurgent targets Ed Pilkington in New YorkMonday May 21, 2007
When the idea of building a new US embassy in Baghdad was first mooted by the American administration in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, there seemed to be a grandiose logic to it.
The compound, by the side of the Tigris, would be a statement of President Bush's intent to expand democracy through the Middle East. Yesterday, however, the entire project was under fresh scrutiny as new details emerged of its cost and scale.
Rising from the dust of the city's Green Zone it is destined, at $592m (£300m), to become the biggest and most expensive US embassy on earth when it opens in September.
It will cover 104 acres (42 hectares) of land, about the size of the Vatican. It will include 27 separate buildings and house about 615 people behind bomb-proof walls. Most of the embassy staff will live in simple, if not quite monastic, accommodation in one-bedroom apartments.
The US ambassador, however, will enjoy a little more elbow room in a high-security home on the compound reported to fill 16,000 square feet (1,500 sq metres). His deputy will have to make do with a more modest 9,500 sq ft.
They will have a pool, gym and communal living areas, and the embassy will have its own power and water supplies.
But commentators and Iraq experts believe the project was flawed from its inception, and have raised concerns it will become an enormous, heavily targeted white elephant that will be an even greater liability if and when the Americans scale back their presence in Iraq.
"What you have is a situation in which they are building an embassy without really thinking about what its functions are," Edward Peck, a former American diplomat in Iraq, told AP.
"What kind of embassy is it when everybody lives inside and it's blast-proof, and people are running around with helmets and crouching behind sandbags?"
Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 about 1,000 US diplomatic and military staff have been using one of his former palaces as a make-shift embassy, which several observers have criticised as giving the regrettable impression that the Americans merely replaced Saddam's authoritarian rule with their own.
Joost Hildermann, an Iraq analyst with the International Crisis Group, said of the new embassy: "This sends a really poor signal to Iraqis that the Americans are building such a huge compound in Baghdad. It does very little to assuage Iraqis who are angry that America is running the country, and not very well at that."
The need to make the compound secure is a top priority. The Green Zone - the fortified four square miles in which the Iraqi and American governments and other international officials operate - used to be relatively peaceful but in recent months has come under almost daily rocket and mortar fire. This month the US embassy ordered its people to wear flak jackets and helmets at all times when in the open after four foreign contractors were killed by a rocket landing beside the present embassy.
The multiple cranes surrounding the construction site of the new embassy have already attracted attacks from insurgents. Last week five contractors were wounded in a rocket assault.
Despite the peculiar pressures, the Bush administration says the embassy will open in September, and be fully staffed by the end of the year.
Already, however, there have been suggestions that the compound will not be large enough to house hundreds of diplomats and military personnel likely to remain in Iraq for some time. Scores of US officials are currently housed in trailers which are vulnerable to bombs landing on their roofs. According to a report by McClatchy News, staff members have complained about the dangers only to be told they must wait until the new embassy is ready to take them in.
Toby Dodge, an expert on Iraq at Queen Mary, University of London, has just come back from a month spent in Iraq, largely in the Green Zone. He thinks the Americans are unlikely to pull out of Iraq fully until the end of the next presidency at the earliest, and so the new embassy will serve its purpose for several years to come.
"A fortress-style embassy, with a huge staff, will remain in Baghdad until helicopters come to airlift the last man and woman from the roof," he said, adding his own advice to the architects of the building: "Include a large roof."
There is one added irony - the embassy is one of the few major projects the administration has undertaken in Iraq that is on schedule and within budget.
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A Deeper Purpose
John Edwards,
This is a serious holiday and a serious time. The American people voted last fall to stand by our troops, end the war, and bring our soldiers home. The Congress has sent the president a bill that would fund the troops and bring them home. But President Bush has embarked on a stubborn path -- rejecting the will of the people and of Congress. He is not only continuing the disastrous war in Iraq, but is escalating our presence there and vetoing Congress's bill that would support the troops. It has become clear that the only way to support our troops and end the war is by direct action -- by democracy.
Some will say that this weekend is not the right time to ask Americans to stand together and tell the president and the Congress to end this war. They may say it is not patriotic, or that it does not honor the fallen.
I strongly disagree. I believe that Memorial Day Weekend is exactly the right time to honor the memory of those who paid the ultimate price for our freedom, and to honor the troops serving us today.
It has been said that dissent is the highest form of patriotism. Mark Twain once wrote that the government must not "decide who is a patriot and who isn't." President Theodore Roosevelt went even farther. He said that to say there should be no criticism of a president is not only "unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
As these wise words make so clear, democracy is a wonderful gift. But it is not free. On the contrary, democracy is also a responsibility. Brave Americans have fought for it again and again, and this holiday honors their sacrifice. There comes a time when citizens, acting together in a democracy, can truly force change. That time is today. And I do not want Americans to stand up and be heard because of any political campaign or ideology, or because they were told to. You should instead reclaim your patriotism for one important reason: it was yours to begin with.
This Memorial Day weekend, this means more than just getting in your car, driving to the beach, a parade, or a picnic and saying the words, "We support our troops." This weekend should honor the memory of the fallen through democracy itself. That's why I am asking the American people this weekend to give something in return for the sacrifice of the fallen -- to honor and remember all those who have gone before in service to our country, and to let our government know we want to honor our troops by ending the war and bringing them home.
I have offered Americans 10 suggested actions that will support our troops and end the war. These actions include sending our troops a care package, gathering in public to make your voice heard (taking a moment of silence beforehand to honor the fallen), organizing a prayer vigil, sending a letter to President Bush, and sending a thank-you note to our troops. In the days leading up to Memorial Day, we should take action to support our troops, end the war, and bring them home to the heroes' welcome they deserve. And on Memorial Day, we should honor and remember all those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.
It was only four decades ago that we found ourselves in a similar place to today. We were embroiled in an unpopular war, plagued by disparities and inequalities here at home, and looking for leadership in Washington, D.C. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called us to action with three simple worlds. As he put it then, there comes a time when "silence is a betrayal" -- not only a betrayal of one's personal convictions, or even of one's country alone, but also a betrayal of our deeper obligations to one another and to the brotherhood of man.
Martin Luther King's demands were not to the government of the United States. He issued a direct appeal to the people of the United States, calling on us to break our own silence and to not sit idly by and wait for others to right the wrongs of the world. Today, I'm again calling on our nation to break its silence -- speak out to end this war and bring our troops home.
At Riverside Church in Harlem in 1967, Dr. King made another attempt to reclaim patriotism. He told his audience they had to move beyond "the prophesying of smooth patriotism" toward "a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history."
This Memorial Day Weekend, we should all take up Dr. King's call to action. It is time to take back patriotism from a president who has misused it to justify policies that have exacted such terrible costs -- from Guantanamo Bay to domestic spying to the War in Iraq itself. Let us reclaim patriotism for all of us who love our country, support our troops, and are ready to end the war -- and to bring these brave servicemen and women home to the heroes' welcome they deserve.
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UFO Disclosure – The Harsh Reality by Patrick Cooke
March 1997 - The Phoenix Lights event garnered the widest international attention of any UFO encounter in modern history in March 13, 1997. Less than two years later, in
January 1999 - Joe Firmage, a Silicon Valley CEO turned UFO evangelist, posted his a 700-page UFO manifesto, "The Truth".
May 2001 - The Disclosure Project National Press Club event mentioned above took place, and Stephen Bassett took up the cause of UFO disclosure in his independent candidacy in the 8th Congressional District of the State of Maryland.
May, 2004 The Mexican Department of Defense released videos of a sighting of multiple UFOs taken by an Air Force Merlín C26A, virtually admitting that UFOs exist.
July, 2004 - Governor of New Mexico and presidential candidate, Bill Richardson, stated, "It would help everyone if the U.S. government disclosed everything it knows."
May, 2005 - A year after the Mexican DoD released its videos, the Brazilian Air Force (FAB) releases all its files on UFO contacts.
September 2005 - Paul Hellyer, Canada’s Defence Minister, publicly stated, "UFOs, are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head."
November 2006 - A significant sighting took place at O'Hare Airport in Chicago and received worldwide attention and media coverage.
February 2007 The Chilean Army discloses recordings and secret contacts with UFOs before over a thousand attendees at the 10th International UFO Congress.
March 2007 - The French national space agency, CNES, placed 1600 previously classified UFO sighting reports into the public domain on the Internet.
March 2007 - Former Arizona governor, Fife Symington, revealed that he had seen a massive black triangular UFO fly overhead early in the evening of March 17, 1997 - the first Phoenix Lights event.
April 2007 - The proposed "U.N. Decade Of Contact" to establish diplomatic relations with advanced E.T.s petition is well on its way to reaching its goal for submission to the United Nations.
And I have seen them also!
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With New Embassy, US Presense In Iraq seems Permanent
Ameerica On the Tigris
One building that's been built on time and on budget in Iraq: America's fortress embassy
· Vatican-sized bomb-proof structure to cost $750 Million· Builders in Green Zone already insurgent targets Ed Pilkington in New YorkMonday May 21, 2007
When the idea of building a new US embassy in Baghdad was first mooted by the American administration in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, there seemed to be a grandiose logic to it.
The compound, by the side of the Tigris, would be a statement of President Bush's intent to expand democracy through the Middle East. Yesterday, however, the entire project was under fresh scrutiny as new details emerged of its cost and scale.
Rising from the dust of the city's Green Zone it is destined, at $592m (£300m), to become the biggest and most expensive US embassy on earth when it opens in September.
It will cover 104 acres (42 hectares) of land, about the size of the Vatican. It will include 27 separate buildings and house about 615 people behind bomb-proof walls. Most of the embassy staff will live in simple, if not quite monastic, accommodation in one-bedroom apartments.
The US ambassador, however, will enjoy a little more elbow room in a high-security home on the compound reported to fill 16,000 square feet (1,500 sq metres). His deputy will have to make do with a more modest 9,500 sq ft.
They will have a pool, gym and communal living areas, and the embassy will have its own power and water supplies.
But commentators and Iraq experts believe the project was flawed from its inception, and have raised concerns it will become an enormous, heavily targeted white elephant that will be an even greater liability if and when the Americans scale back their presence in Iraq.
"What you have is a situation in which they are building an embassy without really thinking about what its functions are," Edward Peck, a former American diplomat in Iraq, told AP.
"What kind of embassy is it when everybody lives inside and it's blast-proof, and people are running around with helmets and crouching behind sandbags?"
Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 about 1,000 US diplomatic and military staff have been using one of his former palaces as a make-shift embassy, which several observers have criticised as giving the regrettable impression that the Americans merely replaced Saddam's authoritarian rule with their own.
Joost Hildermann, an Iraq analyst with the International Crisis Group, said of the new embassy: "This sends a really poor signal to Iraqis that the Americans are building such a huge compound in Baghdad. It does very little to assuage Iraqis who are angry that America is running the country, and not very well at that."
The need to make the compound secure is a top priority. The Green Zone - the fortified four square miles in which the Iraqi and American governments and other international officials operate - used to be relatively peaceful but in recent months has come under almost daily rocket and mortar fire. This month the US embassy ordered its people to wear flak jackets and helmets at all times when in the open after four foreign contractors were killed by a rocket landing beside the present embassy.
The multiple cranes surrounding the construction site of the new embassy have already attracted attacks from insurgents. Last week five contractors were wounded in a rocket assault.
Despite the peculiar pressures, the Bush administration says the embassy will open in September, and be fully staffed by the end of the year.
Already, however, there have been suggestions that the compound will not be large enough to house hundreds of diplomats and military personnel likely to remain in Iraq for some time. Scores of US officials are currently housed in trailers which are vulnerable to bombs landing on their roofs. According to a report by McClatchy News, staff members have complained about the dangers only to be told they must wait until the new embassy is ready to take them in.
Toby Dodge, an expert on Iraq at Queen Mary, University of London, has just come back from a month spent in Iraq, largely in the Green Zone. He thinks the Americans are unlikely to pull out of Iraq fully until the end of the next presidency at the earliest, and so the new embassy will serve its purpose for several years to come.
"A fortress-style embassy, with a huge staff, will remain in Baghdad until helicopters come to airlift the last man and woman from the roof," he said, adding his own advice to the architects of the building: "Include a large roof."
There is one added irony - the embassy is one of the few major projects the administration has undertaken in Iraq that is on schedule and within budget.
______________________________________
A Deeper Purpose
John Edwards,
This is a serious holiday and a serious time. The American people voted last fall to stand by our troops, end the war, and bring our soldiers home. The Congress has sent the president a bill that would fund the troops and bring them home. But President Bush has embarked on a stubborn path -- rejecting the will of the people and of Congress. He is not only continuing the disastrous war in Iraq, but is escalating our presence there and vetoing Congress's bill that would support the troops. It has become clear that the only way to support our troops and end the war is by direct action -- by democracy.
Some will say that this weekend is not the right time to ask Americans to stand together and tell the president and the Congress to end this war. They may say it is not patriotic, or that it does not honor the fallen.
I strongly disagree. I believe that Memorial Day Weekend is exactly the right time to honor the memory of those who paid the ultimate price for our freedom, and to honor the troops serving us today.
It has been said that dissent is the highest form of patriotism. Mark Twain once wrote that the government must not "decide who is a patriot and who isn't." President Theodore Roosevelt went even farther. He said that to say there should be no criticism of a president is not only "unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
As these wise words make so clear, democracy is a wonderful gift. But it is not free. On the contrary, democracy is also a responsibility. Brave Americans have fought for it again and again, and this holiday honors their sacrifice. There comes a time when citizens, acting together in a democracy, can truly force change. That time is today. And I do not want Americans to stand up and be heard because of any political campaign or ideology, or because they were told to. You should instead reclaim your patriotism for one important reason: it was yours to begin with.
This Memorial Day weekend, this means more than just getting in your car, driving to the beach, a parade, or a picnic and saying the words, "We support our troops." This weekend should honor the memory of the fallen through democracy itself. That's why I am asking the American people this weekend to give something in return for the sacrifice of the fallen -- to honor and remember all those who have gone before in service to our country, and to let our government know we want to honor our troops by ending the war and bringing them home.
I have offered Americans 10 suggested actions that will support our troops and end the war. These actions include sending our troops a care package, gathering in public to make your voice heard (taking a moment of silence beforehand to honor the fallen), organizing a prayer vigil, sending a letter to President Bush, and sending a thank-you note to our troops. In the days leading up to Memorial Day, we should take action to support our troops, end the war, and bring them home to the heroes' welcome they deserve. And on Memorial Day, we should honor and remember all those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.
It was only four decades ago that we found ourselves in a similar place to today. We were embroiled in an unpopular war, plagued by disparities and inequalities here at home, and looking for leadership in Washington, D.C. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called us to action with three simple worlds. As he put it then, there comes a time when "silence is a betrayal" -- not only a betrayal of one's personal convictions, or even of one's country alone, but also a betrayal of our deeper obligations to one another and to the brotherhood of man.
Martin Luther King's demands were not to the government of the United States. He issued a direct appeal to the people of the United States, calling on us to break our own silence and to not sit idly by and wait for others to right the wrongs of the world. Today, I'm again calling on our nation to break its silence -- speak out to end this war and bring our troops home.
At Riverside Church in Harlem in 1967, Dr. King made another attempt to reclaim patriotism. He told his audience they had to move beyond "the prophesying of smooth patriotism" toward "a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history."
This Memorial Day Weekend, we should all take up Dr. King's call to action. It is time to take back patriotism from a president who has misused it to justify policies that have exacted such terrible costs -- from Guantanamo Bay to domestic spying to the War in Iraq itself. Let us reclaim patriotism for all of us who love our country, support our troops, and are ready to end the war -- and to bring these brave servicemen and women home to the heroes' welcome they deserve.
_____________________________________
UFO Disclosure – The Harsh Reality by Patrick Cooke
March 1997 - The Phoenix Lights event garnered the widest international attention of any UFO encounter in modern history in March 13, 1997. Less than two years later, in
January 1999 - Joe Firmage, a Silicon Valley CEO turned UFO evangelist, posted his a 700-page UFO manifesto, "The Truth".
May 2001 - The Disclosure Project National Press Club event mentioned above took place, and Stephen Bassett took up the cause of UFO disclosure in his independent candidacy in the 8th Congressional District of the State of Maryland.
May, 2004 The Mexican Department of Defense released videos of a sighting of multiple UFOs taken by an Air Force Merlín C26A, virtually admitting that UFOs exist.
July, 2004 - Governor of New Mexico and presidential candidate, Bill Richardson, stated, "It would help everyone if the U.S. government disclosed everything it knows."
May, 2005 - A year after the Mexican DoD released its videos, the Brazilian Air Force (FAB) releases all its files on UFO contacts.
September 2005 - Paul Hellyer, Canada’s Defence Minister, publicly stated, "UFOs, are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head."
November 2006 - A significant sighting took place at O'Hare Airport in Chicago and received worldwide attention and media coverage.
February 2007 The Chilean Army discloses recordings and secret contacts with UFOs before over a thousand attendees at the 10th International UFO Congress.
March 2007 - The French national space agency, CNES, placed 1600 previously classified UFO sighting reports into the public domain on the Internet.
March 2007 - Former Arizona governor, Fife Symington, revealed that he had seen a massive black triangular UFO fly overhead early in the evening of March 17, 1997 - the first Phoenix Lights event.
April 2007 - The proposed "U.N. Decade Of Contact" to establish diplomatic relations with advanced E.T.s petition is well on its way to reaching its goal for submission to the United Nations.
And I have seen them also!
Friday, May 18, 2007
The War II
Some Laughs
From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE...
Late night snark...for a better tomorrow:
"There was a Republican presidential debate last night. The Republican candidates looked like the evil law firm in a John Grisham movie." ---David Letterman -
"While visiting troops in Iraq on Thursday, Vice President Dick Cheney told them that he knows they are suffering hardships from extended deployments, but the longer stays are vital to the mission. Then, still pointing his sidearm, he slowly backed into his plane and left." ---Amy Poehler -
"The elections are heating up. In a recent interview, John McCain said the last music he bought was The Beach Boys, while Mitt Romney said the last music he bought was Roy Orbison. Apparently, McCain and Romney are both running for president in 1964.' ---Conan O'Brien -
"The [Republican] debate on 'enhanced interrogation techniques' was a good start, but we can go further. Next time I say we put a suspected terrorist up on stage with the candidates and give them each 30 seconds to spill the beans. After all, you can say you're pro-torture, but actions scream louder than words!" ---Stephen Colbert -
"New Rule: You can't send the National Guard to Iraq and then claim it's still here. The helicopters, the Humvees, the men... Like Dorothy and Toto, they're not in Kansas anymore. Sorry, Mr. President, but the last documented case of a National Guardsman able to be in two places at one time...was you. " ---Bill Maher
_______________________________________
Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: "This chamber is, for the most part, silent - ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate."
Why was the Senate silent?
_______________________________________
Concluding the Terrible Mistake We Made in Iraq,
Senator Robert Byrd
Once again, the Congress is debating supplemental funding for President Bush's disastrous misadventure in Iraq. Earlier this year, Congress set a new course for the war in Iraq. It offered a way forward for the Iraqi people and a way home for the U.S. troops while providing for some of the most pressing needs of the nation
But sadly, the president chose to veto that bill.
This president has a single-minded obsession with Iraq and continues to close his eyes and cover his ears to the realities of this occupation. He is unfazed by the U.S. death toll in Iraq which is more than 3,380 men and women, and the death toll of innocent Iraqis which probably numbers in the tens of thousands. The president has freely spent over $378 billion of our treasury in Iraq, some of it subject to horrendous waste and abuse by U.S. contractors in Iraq. The American taxpayer has been ravaged by the profiteering in Iraq, but even worse, our brave troops have been short-changed with inadequate equipment to protect their lives, and shoddy medical care if they make it back home to treat wounds of the body and of the mind.
Seeing no value in anything except continuing his quixotic "mission impossible," the president has already threatened to veto House funding legislation. He claims that it "could unreasonably burden the president's exercise of his constitutional authorities, including his authority as commander in chief ..." because it sets a date for withdrawal and provides funding for the occupation only until late July. The president also objects to funding in the bill which would help to rebuild the Gulf Coast States, to improve health care for our troops and our veterans, compensate for the shortfall in the States' Children's Health Insurance Program, fund low-income heating assistance, and increase funding for homeland security.
President Bush raises constitutional concerns in his latest veto threat. I suppose one could be encouraged that constitutional concerns even exist in the Bush kingdom. After setting aside the Constitution whenever convenient to justify pre-emptive attacks, illegal searches, secret wiretapping, clandestine military tribunals, treaty violations, kidnapping, torture, and a rejection of habeas corpus, one has to wonder about the nature of these purported "constitutional concerns." If the Constitution is finally to be read, let us read it in its entirety, including the articles which give the people's Representatives the power over the purse, and the power to declare war.
We need to conclude this terrible mistake we have made in Iraq. Anti-Americanism is more robust now than in any period in our history because of Iraq. The international community is skeptical of U.S. intentions because of Iraq. Our Constitution has been trampled because of Iraq. Thousands of U.S. troops and Iraqi citizens have lost their lives because of Iraq. Thousands more are maimed physically or mentally because of Iraq. Billions of U.S. dollars have been wasted because of Iraq. President Bush has lost all credibility because of Iraq. Terrorism is on the rise worldwide because of Iraq.
Congress will go to conference for a second time next week to work on legislation that will provide critical funding for the U.S. military. The White House has been engaged in the effort to find common ground on new legislation. We must work together to craft a plan that provides equipment and training to keep our troops safe and also spurs the Iraqi people to make a stand for the future of their own nation. I hope that we can reach a bipartisan solution on this supplemental legislation that meets the expectations and needs of the American people and sets a new direction for Iraq.
______________________________________
Hang In There, America: Competent Leadership Is Just 600-Plus Days Away By Joseph L. Galloway
As of May 17th, there were 613 days left until Jan. 20, 2009, and the end of our long national nightmare as President George W. Bush and his Rasputin, Vice President Dick Cheney, shuffle off to their necessarily well-guarded retirement homes and onto the ash heap of history.
So much of what they talked about doing in a new century and a new and different world never came to pass. So much of what they did to grow the power of the presidency and prune the constitutional safeguards crafted by our Founding Fathers, they never talked about.
The American people have turned their backs on George Bush and his dreams of planting the seeds of democracy in Mesopotamia at the point of a gun and seeing them spread like kudzu across the Middle East.
He's failed in his quest for victory in Iraq and for a world put in order by a new and stronger United States, and his brash blundering into a dangerous land has made us all much less safe.
The president's approval ratings are below his knees, sinking to 28 percent in one recent poll, and he cannot recover short of the kind of miracle that parts seas and feeds the multitudes.
The war that was never ours to win by military means - the only button this president who never learned war ever learned how to push - is lost. Bush and Cheney and the rest of their cronies and co-conspirators are toast.
The question is: How did such ordinary-looking men - seemingly unable to carry out even the smallest non-political tasks of governing - succeed in doing such extraordinary and lasting damage to our country, our military and our body politic in so few years?
With Congress in the hands of the Democrats, and the 2008 election looming dead ahead, the president can't even count on key figures in his own Republican Party to stand behind him as he embarks on a long and painful lame duckhood.
His hopes of crafting meaningful immigration reform and fixing Social Security are dead on arrival. The legacies that George W. Bush will carry into retirement are the war he started, lost and stubbornly refused to end, and the corruption that he and his team visited on our democracy and Constitution.
The president's lawyer, "mi abogado," Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, dangles in the wind as we learn, day by day, of how grotesquely this administration politicized the professional staff of the Justice Department.
It was Gonzales, as White House counsel, who provided legal cover for the torture and maltreatment of prisoners and suspects that led directly to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the CIA's secret Kafkaesque prisons scattered around the world where "enhanced" interrogation methods were generously, if unproductively, employed.
It was Gonzales, as attorney general, who hired and gave unprecedented hiring and firing powers to a 33-year-old attorney, Monica Goodling, who'd graduated from a TV evangelist's law school. It was Goodling who resigned and took the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions that hadn't even been asked. It was Goodling who was Justice's liaison to the White House and Karl Rove.
Meantime, the White House can't find 5 million e-mail messages involving official business and refuses to provide many of those it can find to the congressional committees investigating the firing of U.S. attorneys.
The agencies of government - the CIA, FBI, Treasury, Department of Defense and who knows who else - use secret executive authority to suck up databases of personal information about ordinary Americans, without regard to their privacy rights, in a search for suspected terrorists.
Have they found any using that information? Have they unearthed terror cells with more potential than the ones in Florida and New Jersey that were penetrated and perhaps manipulated by FBI informants? That sort of terrorist isn't half so frightening as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
Over in Iraq, 150,000 American troops soldier on, attempting, at the cost of their own lives and limbs, to follow the orders of a president who still thinks he can pull victory out of defeat.
A democratically elected but hopelessly divided Iraqi parliament feuds and dithers and contemplates its summer vacation while Americans and Iraqis die in increasing numbers in the streets outside the Green Zone, and the mortar and rocket fire lands inside that sanctuary with increasing frequency.
Six-hundred-fourteen days, and counting. Nineteen months. It doesn't seem possible or even bearable.
AMEN !!
From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE...
Late night snark...for a better tomorrow:
"There was a Republican presidential debate last night. The Republican candidates looked like the evil law firm in a John Grisham movie." ---David Letterman -
"While visiting troops in Iraq on Thursday, Vice President Dick Cheney told them that he knows they are suffering hardships from extended deployments, but the longer stays are vital to the mission. Then, still pointing his sidearm, he slowly backed into his plane and left." ---Amy Poehler -
"The elections are heating up. In a recent interview, John McCain said the last music he bought was The Beach Boys, while Mitt Romney said the last music he bought was Roy Orbison. Apparently, McCain and Romney are both running for president in 1964.' ---Conan O'Brien -
"The [Republican] debate on 'enhanced interrogation techniques' was a good start, but we can go further. Next time I say we put a suspected terrorist up on stage with the candidates and give them each 30 seconds to spill the beans. After all, you can say you're pro-torture, but actions scream louder than words!" ---Stephen Colbert -
"New Rule: You can't send the National Guard to Iraq and then claim it's still here. The helicopters, the Humvees, the men... Like Dorothy and Toto, they're not in Kansas anymore. Sorry, Mr. President, but the last documented case of a National Guardsman able to be in two places at one time...was you. " ---Bill Maher
_______________________________________
Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: "This chamber is, for the most part, silent - ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate."
Why was the Senate silent?
_______________________________________
Concluding the Terrible Mistake We Made in Iraq,
Senator Robert Byrd
Once again, the Congress is debating supplemental funding for President Bush's disastrous misadventure in Iraq. Earlier this year, Congress set a new course for the war in Iraq. It offered a way forward for the Iraqi people and a way home for the U.S. troops while providing for some of the most pressing needs of the nation
But sadly, the president chose to veto that bill.
This president has a single-minded obsession with Iraq and continues to close his eyes and cover his ears to the realities of this occupation. He is unfazed by the U.S. death toll in Iraq which is more than 3,380 men and women, and the death toll of innocent Iraqis which probably numbers in the tens of thousands. The president has freely spent over $378 billion of our treasury in Iraq, some of it subject to horrendous waste and abuse by U.S. contractors in Iraq. The American taxpayer has been ravaged by the profiteering in Iraq, but even worse, our brave troops have been short-changed with inadequate equipment to protect their lives, and shoddy medical care if they make it back home to treat wounds of the body and of the mind.
Seeing no value in anything except continuing his quixotic "mission impossible," the president has already threatened to veto House funding legislation. He claims that it "could unreasonably burden the president's exercise of his constitutional authorities, including his authority as commander in chief ..." because it sets a date for withdrawal and provides funding for the occupation only until late July. The president also objects to funding in the bill which would help to rebuild the Gulf Coast States, to improve health care for our troops and our veterans, compensate for the shortfall in the States' Children's Health Insurance Program, fund low-income heating assistance, and increase funding for homeland security.
President Bush raises constitutional concerns in his latest veto threat. I suppose one could be encouraged that constitutional concerns even exist in the Bush kingdom. After setting aside the Constitution whenever convenient to justify pre-emptive attacks, illegal searches, secret wiretapping, clandestine military tribunals, treaty violations, kidnapping, torture, and a rejection of habeas corpus, one has to wonder about the nature of these purported "constitutional concerns." If the Constitution is finally to be read, let us read it in its entirety, including the articles which give the people's Representatives the power over the purse, and the power to declare war.
We need to conclude this terrible mistake we have made in Iraq. Anti-Americanism is more robust now than in any period in our history because of Iraq. The international community is skeptical of U.S. intentions because of Iraq. Our Constitution has been trampled because of Iraq. Thousands of U.S. troops and Iraqi citizens have lost their lives because of Iraq. Thousands more are maimed physically or mentally because of Iraq. Billions of U.S. dollars have been wasted because of Iraq. President Bush has lost all credibility because of Iraq. Terrorism is on the rise worldwide because of Iraq.
Congress will go to conference for a second time next week to work on legislation that will provide critical funding for the U.S. military. The White House has been engaged in the effort to find common ground on new legislation. We must work together to craft a plan that provides equipment and training to keep our troops safe and also spurs the Iraqi people to make a stand for the future of their own nation. I hope that we can reach a bipartisan solution on this supplemental legislation that meets the expectations and needs of the American people and sets a new direction for Iraq.
______________________________________
Hang In There, America: Competent Leadership Is Just 600-Plus Days Away By Joseph L. Galloway
As of May 17th, there were 613 days left until Jan. 20, 2009, and the end of our long national nightmare as President George W. Bush and his Rasputin, Vice President Dick Cheney, shuffle off to their necessarily well-guarded retirement homes and onto the ash heap of history.
So much of what they talked about doing in a new century and a new and different world never came to pass. So much of what they did to grow the power of the presidency and prune the constitutional safeguards crafted by our Founding Fathers, they never talked about.
The American people have turned their backs on George Bush and his dreams of planting the seeds of democracy in Mesopotamia at the point of a gun and seeing them spread like kudzu across the Middle East.
He's failed in his quest for victory in Iraq and for a world put in order by a new and stronger United States, and his brash blundering into a dangerous land has made us all much less safe.
The president's approval ratings are below his knees, sinking to 28 percent in one recent poll, and he cannot recover short of the kind of miracle that parts seas and feeds the multitudes.
The war that was never ours to win by military means - the only button this president who never learned war ever learned how to push - is lost. Bush and Cheney and the rest of their cronies and co-conspirators are toast.
The question is: How did such ordinary-looking men - seemingly unable to carry out even the smallest non-political tasks of governing - succeed in doing such extraordinary and lasting damage to our country, our military and our body politic in so few years?
With Congress in the hands of the Democrats, and the 2008 election looming dead ahead, the president can't even count on key figures in his own Republican Party to stand behind him as he embarks on a long and painful lame duckhood.
His hopes of crafting meaningful immigration reform and fixing Social Security are dead on arrival. The legacies that George W. Bush will carry into retirement are the war he started, lost and stubbornly refused to end, and the corruption that he and his team visited on our democracy and Constitution.
The president's lawyer, "mi abogado," Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, dangles in the wind as we learn, day by day, of how grotesquely this administration politicized the professional staff of the Justice Department.
It was Gonzales, as White House counsel, who provided legal cover for the torture and maltreatment of prisoners and suspects that led directly to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the CIA's secret Kafkaesque prisons scattered around the world where "enhanced" interrogation methods were generously, if unproductively, employed.
It was Gonzales, as attorney general, who hired and gave unprecedented hiring and firing powers to a 33-year-old attorney, Monica Goodling, who'd graduated from a TV evangelist's law school. It was Goodling who resigned and took the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions that hadn't even been asked. It was Goodling who was Justice's liaison to the White House and Karl Rove.
Meantime, the White House can't find 5 million e-mail messages involving official business and refuses to provide many of those it can find to the congressional committees investigating the firing of U.S. attorneys.
The agencies of government - the CIA, FBI, Treasury, Department of Defense and who knows who else - use secret executive authority to suck up databases of personal information about ordinary Americans, without regard to their privacy rights, in a search for suspected terrorists.
Have they found any using that information? Have they unearthed terror cells with more potential than the ones in Florida and New Jersey that were penetrated and perhaps manipulated by FBI informants? That sort of terrorist isn't half so frightening as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
Over in Iraq, 150,000 American troops soldier on, attempting, at the cost of their own lives and limbs, to follow the orders of a president who still thinks he can pull victory out of defeat.
A democratically elected but hopelessly divided Iraqi parliament feuds and dithers and contemplates its summer vacation while Americans and Iraqis die in increasing numbers in the streets outside the Green Zone, and the mortar and rocket fire lands inside that sanctuary with increasing frequency.
Six-hundred-fourteen days, and counting. Nineteen months. It doesn't seem possible or even bearable.
AMEN !!
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