Iraq about big oil companies

Chapter 1 of the Iraq Study Group report lays out Iraq's importance to its region, the U.S. and the world with this reminder: "It has the world's second-largest known oil reserves." For any degree of oil privatization to take place, and for it to apply to all the country's oil fields, Iraq has to amend its constitution and pass a new national oil law.

The Bush administration hired the consultancy firm Bearing Point more than a year ago to advise the Iraqi Oil Ministry on drafting and passing a new national oil law. Iraqi Finance Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi (who is now vice president) explained how this law would open Iraq's oil industry to private foreign investment.

This, in turn, would be "very promising to the American investors and to American enterprise, certainly to oil companies." The law would implement production-sharing agreements. Much to the deep frustration of the U.S. government and American oil companies, that law has still not been passed.

All told, the Iraq Study Group has simply made the case for extending the war until foreign oil companies — presumably American ones — have guaranteed legal access to all of Iraq's oil fields and until they are assured the best legal and financial terms possible. We can thank the Iraq Study Group for making its case publicly.

It is now our turn to decide if we wish to spill more blood for oil.

USA and Sadaam

Read today:
Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam's weird trial, forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose our culpability.

Kurdish survivors of Halabja and the Shia rose up against the dictator at our request in 1991 and and were betrayed by us - and whose comrades, in their tens of thousands, along with their wives, were hanged like thrushes by Saddam's executioners

And the mass killings we perpetrated in 2003 with our depleted uranium shells and our "bunker buster" bombs and our phosphorous, the murderous post-invasion sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, the hell-disaster of anarchy we unleashed on the Iraqi population in the aftermath of our "victory" - our "mission accomplished" - who will be found guilty of this? Such expiation as we might expect will come, no doubt, in the self-serving memoirs of Blair and Bush, written in comfortable and wealthy retirement.

His execution will go down as an American affair and time will add its false but lasting gloss to all this - that the West destroyed an Arab leader who no longer obeyed his orders from Washington, that, for all his wrongdoing (and this will be the terrible get-out for Arab historians, this shaving away of his crimes) Saddam died a "martyr" to the will of the new "Crusaders".
Say it isn't true????

2999 today in Iraq

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who wins and loses in republican wars

WAR is a racket. It always has been. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

How many of these neo-con war millionaires EVER shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle? AND WHO PAYS THE BILL???

And what is this bill? This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Death and all its attendant miseries. AND Back-breaking taxation for generations and genenerations to come. (HUGE NATIONAL DEBT MOUNTING EACH DAY FOR YOUR CHILDREN TO PAY)

republicans continue Iraq war

US cost (admitted) $354+ Billion----Total non-mortal US casualties at least 46,880----Total US dead "at least" 2997---- notcounting at least 650+ US "contractors"and the innocent Iraqi women and children, (AND it will end up in Islamic Law whichever side of the civil war wins.) Take a guess as to who doesn't have their sons and daughters in their war????

dead in Iraq

2989 dead in Iraq (military only)

bush,Iran, republican wars

read today:
Bush is a brutal, pathological liar -- arguably a homicidal maniac. After losing two wars against helpless, unarmed nations, he's bored. The Decider is moving on to greater things, and those who know how to listen to him know the decision to nuke Iran has already been made.

Before he leaves office, Bush plans to spread the same freedoms throughout Iran that Iraq is presently enjoying, only this time he has decided to attack a huge, oil-rich, armed-to-the-teeth nation which has the capacity not only to defend itself, but to wreak death and destruction upon its attackers.

republican finances

The Financial Report of the United States Government, the summation of the 2006 fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, found that had the federal government used the same accounting practices used by the private sector, the 2006 federal budget deficit would have been $449.5 billion, not the widely reported $247.7 billion.

While the official national debt is pegged at about $8.5 trillion, according to Walker, the net present value of the government's "total reported liabilities, net social insurance commitments, and other fiscal exposures continue to grow and now total approximately $50 trillion, representing approximately four times the nation's total output (GDP) in fiscal year 2006, up from about $20 trillion, or two times GDP in fiscal year 2000."

So, here's the overall picture - and it's not a pretty one. The Baby Boomer generation is starting to take their retirements, pushing up the costs of Medicare and Medicaid. Social Security should be solvent, but the money that was supposed to be set aside for the Boomer retirements has already been spent. We're paying hundreds of billions of dollars a year in interest payments to China, Japan and other countries that hold U.S. Treasury securities - borrowing that is covering the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

2983 in Iraq

2983 and counting

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cost of Republican War

Cost of Iraq
US cost (admitted) $353+ Billion
Total non-mortal US casualties at least 46,880
Total US dead at least 2972 not
counting at least 650 US "contractors"
and the innocent Iraqi women and children,
(AND it will end up in Islamic Law whichever
side of the civil war wins.)

hidden republican agenda

Asked by a reporter on Oct. 25 if we are winning the war, Bush said, “Absolutely, we’re winning.” He now says, “We’re not winning, but we’re not losing.”
America’s secret torture prisons, whose existence Bush acknowledged as part of his tough-guy campaigning this fall. Set up in the aftermath of 9/11 to hold suspected terrorists indefinitely, the legality, morality and practicality of these so-called “black sites” have come under scrutiny. After a brief flurry about the use of torture tactics like “water boarding,” where a prisoner is made to feel he’s drowning, the story of these CIA-operated overseas prisons faded.

Yet they contributed to the central tragedy of the Bush administration, the collapse of America’s standing around the world.Karl Rove decided the best way for Republicans to retain control of the House and Senate was to embrace the war in Iraq and run against the Democrats as “Defeatocrats” and “Cut and Runners.”

It might have worked, had not most Americans decided they did indeed want to cut and run. Not right away—the voters want an orderly exit—but they weren’t buying Bush’s big lie about the Democrats. Now that the Democrats have won, watch Bush try to off-load blame for the failure in Iraq.
Days after giving Defense Secretary Rumsfeld a ringing endorsement, declaring he would be there until the end, Bush fired him. It was the most obvious lie of his presidency. And it tripped so easily off Bush’s tongue. There was none of the stammering that usually accompanies his public utterances.
There are 100,000 government contractors in Iraq, a number that rivals the 140,000 U.S. soldiers in the country. It’s dangerous work; some 650 contractors have died there. They do a lot of the jobs the military used to do.

They work for military contractors like KBR and DynCorp International. This is the largest contingent of civilians ever operating in a battlefield environment, and there’s been no congressional oversight or accountability. That should change with the Democrats taking over the investigative committees on Capitol Hill. The abuses may be just waiting to be investigating.

America’s secret torture prisons, whose existence Bush acknowledged as part of his tough-guy campaigning this fall.. After a brief flurry about the use of torture tactics like “water boarding,” where a prisoner is made to feel he’s drowning, the story of these CIA-operated overseas prisons faded. Yet they contributed to the central tragedy of the Bush administration, the collapse of America’s standing around the world.

Republican face-saving in Iraq

Iraq is now the lame-duck war, but lame ducks have a way of hobbling around for a while. We know that George W. Bush will be quacking for two more years, sometimes in bipartisan tone, faux or real, and sometimes with instinctive calls to the base that failed him, Rove and Rumsfeld in 2006.

The difference with Iraq, which is of course Bush’s twin lame duck, is that Americans and Iraqis are dying every day. How many more will die month after month after month of the remaining Republican Presidency?

These kids on the front lines deserve to be treated as something more than pawns in a face-saving exercise.

republican wars by contractors

Shane Schmidt was a U.S. Marine for seven years, the leader of a sniper unit. Chuck Shepard spent seven years in the U.S. Army. After leaving the military, each found his way into the legions of heavily armed private security contractors working in Iraq.

The two were working together on July 8, 2006, when they claim they witnessed what they believe was a crime. They say another American fired, unprovoked, into two Iraqi civilian vehicles.The men were fired, along with their supervisor, who has denied wrongdoing, according to the company. Shepard and Schmidt are now suing Triple Canopy. Their lawsuit alleges they were fired "in retaliation for their reporting criminal activity which they had witnessed."

Triple Canopy says it filed a report with Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), the prime contractor for whom it was working. It reported the incident to the U.S. military three days after it was told of the shootings. KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, said it would not comment on the issue because of the ongoing litigation. All these subsidiaries limit financial responsitility.

Shepard and Schmidt say they haven't been contacted. "There's been no follow-up whatsoever by any government agencies," says Schmidt, and its not just this incident. Despite similar allegations involving other companies, not a single security contractor in Iraq has yet faced charges for attacking civilians. Heavily armed civilian contractors working with no oversight or controls and accountability. Republican war.

Republicans, the deciders

If the job of more boots on the ground is to separate Iraqi Shiite and Sunni neighbors who’ve learned to fear and loathe each other since the U.S. invasion, who now nourish ferocious vendettas, and who thoroughly disrespect American grunts who share nothing of their language, faith, culture or long-term concerns—well, that’s just not going to work. We will have made our big push, our last-ditch drive, and come up short.

The surge is a surefire formula, in fact, for turning what still could be called a retreat with honor into an outright defeat with humiliation. That is just what America’s enemies around the world would like to see—and it is just what the Iraq Study Group wanted to avoid.

Their plan as of two weeks ago (it seems so long already) was for "our" Iraqis to win the war, of course, if such a thing were possible, but much more importantly for the Iraqis to bear responsibility for losing it if they fail to get their act together. It was a cynical strategy for shifting blame, and far from ideal, but at least it wasn’t built on a cheerleader’s delusion that more American muscle is what it takes to set the Iraqis straight.

Apparently The Decider has decided not to explain to the public what he’s decided until he decides he’s good and ready. Decidedly, we’ve heard this kind of spin before. Four years ago, when Bush knew damn well he was going to invade Iraq, he kept telling the public he hadn’t made any final determination.

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2954 and counting daily

Republicans lying hypocrites

After repeatedly saying we were winning in Iraq as late as last week, President Bush yesterday acknowledged for the first time yesterday that the United States is not winning the war in Iraq, because he now wants to use that to expand the overall size of the "stressed" U.S.

Asked yesterday about his "absolutely, we're winning" comment at an Oct. 25 news conference, the president recast it as a prediction rather than an assessment. "Yes, that was an indication of my belief we're going to win," he said.

What lying hypocrites these Republicans are.

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making us safe

An accident occurred last year as a decades-old nuclear warhead was being dismantled at the government's Pantex facility, 17 miles northeast of Amarillo in the Panhandle of Texas (the country's only factory for assembling and disassembling nuclear weapons).

The weapon was a W-56 warhead, with a yield of 1,200 kilotons, 100 times the destructive power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The warheads were first put in service in 1965 on Minuteman missiles and don't have the safety features of more recent models that protect against detonation. The accident, in which an unsafe amount of pressure was applied to the warhead, could have caused it to explode.

When a mechanism that is part of the disassembly equipment fails to prevent application of too much pressure, Energy Department regulations require that a new or different device be used, the summary states. However, "due to expediency/convenience," the same device was used the next day in a second attempt to disassemble the warhead

An anonymous letter, purportedly sent by Pantex employees, warning that long hours and efforts to increase output were causing dangerous conditions in the plant. Most production technicians work five 10-hour days, plus weekends," the letter states. "Our safety analysts get pounded on a daily basis to support the production schedule and are expected at times to work around-the-clock, And this is BEFORE we take the insane step of trying to complete work on 50 percent more units this fiscal year." (Saving money to spend in Iraq.)

investigate and provide oversight

The policy we are pursuing—maintaining 144,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and hoping that things improve—is not sustainable either in Iraq or in America.

"We're winning," President Bush still said last week. He continues to lie. It is a sad fact, but a fact nonetheless—America is not winning in Iraq, which means that it is losing. Iraq has fallen apart both as a nation and as a state.

So now what do these Republicans give us. Someone is feeding Bush the new spin words, "the way forward" We will hear them use it over and over again. But, hope is not a policy. It is past time to confront reality. They say don't look back. We say Bull----!!!

Congress better provide oversight so it doesn't happen again. We want to know the, who- how-why and how much did they benefit, of those that got us into this mess? so INVESTIGATE.

.

Iraq 7 more at 2949

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class warfare

How it possible that economic pie is getting bigger -- how can it be true that most Americans are getting smaller slices? The answer, of course, is that a few people are getting much, much bigger slices. Although wages have stagnated since Bush took office, corporate profits have doubled.

The gap between the nation's CEOs and average workers is now ten times greater than it was a generation ago. And while Bush's tax cuts shaved only a few hundred dollars off the tax bills of most Americans, they saved the richest one percent more than $44,000 on average. In fact, once all of Bush's tax cuts take effect, it is estimated that those with incomes of more than $200,000 a year -- the richest five percent of the population -- will pocket almost half of the money. In this Republican era, economic inequality is on the rise.

For the first time in our history, so much growth is being siphoned off to a small, wealthy minority that most Americans are losing ground even during a time of economic growth -- and they know it. CEO pay has soared -- from less than thirty times the average wage to almost 300 times the typical worker's pay. Those who benefit are playing class warfare card, not those of us who mention it.

falsified Iraq war

The British government never believed Saddam Hussein posed a threat to British interests and warned the US that toppling him would lead to "chaos", according to a Foreign Office diplomat closely involved in negotiations in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

Damning repudiation of the government's public claims in the run-up to the war is contained in secret evidence to Lord Butler's committee on the abuse of intelligence over Iraq by Carne Ross, a diplomat at Britain's UN mission in New York.

Mr Ross continued: "There was no intelligence evidence of significant holdings of CW [chemical warfare], BW [biological warfare] or nuclear material.

"At no time did [the government-the British government] assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK," he told the Butler committee. "On the contrary, it was the commonly-held view among the officials dealing with Iraq that any threat had been effectively contained ... At the same time, we would frequently argue, when the US raised the subject, that 'regime change' was inadvisable, primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos."

He said colleagues in other UN delegations told him the UK sold security council resolution 1441 - later used to help justify the invasion - "explicitly on the grounds that it did not represent authorization for war". Yet the USA neo-con Republicans went ahead with their war anyway.

Iraq 2942

2942 killed and $351 billion down the rathole

tortured the innocent

The Pentagon called them "among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the Earth," sweeping them up after Sept. 11 and hauling them in chains to a U.S. military prison in southeastern Cuba. Since then, hundreds of the men have been transferred from Guantanamo Bay to other countries, many of them for "continued detention." And then set free (205 out of 245).

Decisions by more than a dozen countries in the Middle East, Europe and South Asia to release the former detainees raise questions about whether they were really as dangerous as the United States claimed.

Decisions by more than a dozen countries in the Middle East, Europe and South Asia to release the former detainees raise questions about whether they were really as dangerous as the United States claimed.

Apparently innocent people tortured by our country run by these Republicans give the lie to others around the world that we are the moral country we claim to be.

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U.S. price tag is currently at least $350(+1) billion of our money and "at least 2,937 ( 4 a day so far this month) " members of the U.S. military have died, not counting (1)"contractors" (2) Iraqi civilian women and children (3) the tens of thousands that have been wounded, and (4) the one in five surviving soldiers that have lingering mental problems.

Let's never forget it is the Republicans who got us in and are keeping us in this mess.

hijacked Republican party

read today:
Political science 101 definitions liberals are those who look forward, conservatives those who support the status quo, reactionaries, want to return to the past and revolutionaries want rapid change. I think the GOP has been taken over by a new force, one that meets at the base of the political circle; think of this circle as the face of a clock; moderates - Republicans and Democrats - meet at twelve, neo-conservatives meet at six.

Neo-cons seem to combine the extreme ideologies. Why do they want to return to the past? I think because they are afraid of the future, they see the emergence of people who are not like them (people of color, non-christian) as a threat; hence, those who support the goals of the New American Century hijacked the Republican Party. Their policy of world domination is motivated by fear and greed and in no way emulates the traditional values of Americans or of our society

Iraq and the media

U.S. price tag is currently at least $350 billion of our money and "at least 2,937(+9 since last update) " members of the U.S. military have died, not counting (1)"contractors" (2) Iraqi civilian women and children (3) the tens of thousands that have been wounded, and (4) the one in five surviving soldiers that have lingering mental problems.Let's never forget it is the Republicans who got us into this civil war and are keeping us in this mess. HAVE YOU READ OR HEARD THIS ON TV?? SO, WHY ISN'T THE "MEDIA" KEEPING AND PUBLISHING THESE STATS???

and protect us from these Republicans

reasons for invading Iraq?

U.S. businesses were looking at Iraq as a significant opportunity before the war began. With vast oil resources, underserved population and strategic location, that nation had all the markings of a place for U.S firms to expand. How interesting, I wonder if that is one of the hidden reasons we invaded that country.

Major American companies that went into Iraq on U.S. government contracts, including Bechtel, Parsons and Halliburton subsidiary KBR, had hoped reconstruction work would serve as a natural bridge to private-sector deals in Iraq.

Instead, they found rampant violence, still three years later with 70% unemployment, with many U.S.-funded projects coming under attack and workers being targeted. Now, with their contracts expiring, Parsons and Bechtel are closing up shop in Iraq and returning home. KBR is doing the same with its reconstruction work, though it continues to hold a major contract supporting the U.S. Army.

"We're pleading with the companies to give Iraq a second or third look," said retired Lt. Gen. Daniel Christman, senior vice president for international affairs at the Chamber of Commerce.

It's ok for our troops to be ordered to Iraq and face death in a civil war, but the big corporations who initially scooped up the BILLIONS OF DOLLARS apparently don't want to go back. And who would you guess are big contributors to the Republicans??

4 a day in Iraq

U.S. price tag is currently at least $349 billion of our money and "at least 2,932 ( 4 a day so far this month) " members of the U.S. military have died, not counting (1)"contractors" (2) Iraqi civilian women and children (3) the tens of thousands that have been wounded, and (4) the one in five surviving soldiers that have lingering mental problems.Let's never forget it is the Republicans who got us in and are keeping us in this mess. HAVE YOU READ OR HEARD THIS ON TV?? SO, WHY ISN'T THE "MEDIA" KEEPING AND PUBLISHING THESE STATS???

slow loss of freedom

Who could have imagined ten years ago that Congress would permit the Republican regime to eliminate habeas corpus? Our founders understood this was the bedrock fundamental principle of a free people. No political opponents could be rounded up and jailed by a tyrant. No one could presume to be above the law. Yet there was hardly a peep from blasé American consumers. The mainstream press reassured us that good Americans had nothing to worry about.

We welcome reassuring propaganda that reinforces our noble purposes in the Middle East and elsewhere. We do not care to investigate personally, or even listen to, the evidence of our considerable crimes.

History will not treat us kindly. We will be remembered as the Americans who insulated themselves from reality and remained self-absorbed, concerned with their own personal comfort and privilege while our government wrecked havoc on the world and destroyed our own culture.

It will be difficult for future generations to understand how it happened and the sequence of events. Our freedom is slowly being taken away and no one is paying attention.

more lies

read today:
Manipulation of facts was often very crude. As an example of the systematic distortion, the Iraq Study Group revealed last week that on one day last July US officials reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence. In reality, it added, "a careful review of the reports ... brought to light 1,100 acts of violence".

The 10-fold reduction in the number of acts of violence officially noted was achieved by not reporting the murder of an Iraqi, or roadside bomb, rocket or mortar attacks aimed at US troops that failed to inflict casualties.

I remember visiting a unit of US combat engineers camped outside Fallujah in January 2004 who told me that they had stopped reporting insurgent attacks on themselves unless they suffered losses as commanders wanted to hear only that the number of attacks was going down. As I was drove away, a sergeant begged us not to attribute what he had said: "If you do I am in real trouble."

now Iraq is about oil corporations

December 8, 2006 -- WHILE THE Bush administration, the media and nearly all the Democrats still refuse to explain the war in Iraq in terms of oil, the ever-pragmatic members of the Iraq Study Group share no such reticence.

Page 1, Chapter 1 of the Iraq Study Group report lays out Iraq's importance to its region, the U.S. and the world with this reminder: "It has the world's second-largest known oil reserves." The group then proceeds to give very specific and radical recommendations as to what the United States should do to secure those reserves.

If the proposals are followed, Iraq's national oil industry will be commercialized and opened to foreign firms.The report makes visible to everyone the elephant in the room: that we are fighting, killing and dying in a war for oil. It states in plain language that the U.S. government should use every tool at its disposal to ensure that American oil interests and those of its corporations are met.

It's spelled out in Recommendation No. 63, which calls on the U.S. to "assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise" and to "encourage investment in Iraq's oil sector by the international community and by international energy companies." This recommendation would turn Iraq's nationalized oil industry into a commercial entity that could be partly or fully privatized by foreign firms.

more Iraq

U.S. price tag is currently at least $349 billion of our money and "at least 2,928(+12 since last update) " members of the U.S. military have died, not counting (1)"contractors" (2) Iraqi civilian women and children (3) the tens of thousands that have been wounded, and (4) the one in five surviving soldiers that have lingering mental problems.Let's never forget it is the Republicans who got us in and are keeping us in this mess. HAVE YOU READ OR HEARD THIS ON TV?? SO, WHY ISN'T THE "MEDIA" KEEPING AND PUBLISHING THESE STATS???

Republicans extend tax breaks

The Republican controlled 109th Congress adjourned yesterday morning with final passage of measures to expand civilian nuclear trade with India, establish permanent trade relations with Vietnam and extend a bevy of expiring business tax breaks.

endless Republican civil war

James D. Fearon, an expert on civil conflict at Stanford University, said that "by any reasonable definition, Iraq is in the midst of a civil war.

The White House’s steadfast refusal to call this conflict a civil war feels more like denial than delusion. President Bush understands that using the term 'civil war" would force him to concede that the defining act of his presidency had ended in ruin. So, our troops continue being wounded and dying so these Republicans don't have to admit that they goofed and lied us into war. THAT MAY EVEN BE CRIMINAL.

Americans should not continue to send their sons and daughters into the Iraqi maelstrom in order to defend Iraqi factions from one another. What’s more, civil wars rarely have the kind of equitable conclusion that the Bush administration has envisioned in Iraq.

Fearon testified that the 54 such conflicts he studied typically lasted more than 10 years and normally ended with decisive military victory rather than power-sharing agreements. History, he said, indicates that the current administration strategy “is highly unlikely to succeed, whether the U.S. stays in Iraq for six more months or six more years (or more).”

big money at it again

Among the 160 or so wealthy Republicans the Romney campaign had invited for the weekend was a particularly important group of potential supporters -- the 40 or so men and women who were "Rangers" or "Pioneers" in the 2000 and 2004 campaigns of President Bush.

In this new world of presidential fund raising, finding a wealthy person and persuading him or her to write a check is not the gold standard. Instead, the goal is to identify individuals who not only can contribute the federal limit of $2,000 but also can persuade 100 or so of their friends and business associates to do the same.

"The relationship did not start or end when they wrote a check," Vogel said. "They were not just donors but part of the organization."

McCain and Romney are mimicking the Bush model not only in terms of the individuals they are courting but also in the approach they are taking to their pitch: a heavy emphasis on personal attention

The big donors received top-level strategy briefings and were feted at campaign events. Many received appointments to the transition team after Bush was elected, and many others received ambassadorships, including Ron Weiser to Slovakia and Howard Leach to France.

battle of the titans

an interesting read:
So, the battle lines have been drawn. On one side we have James Baker and his corporate classmates who want to restore order while preserving America’s imperial role in the region. And, on the other side, we have the neo-Trotskyites and Israeli-Jacobins who seek a fragmented and chaotic Middle East where Israel is the dominant power.

The one group that has no voice in this "Battle of the Titans" is the American people. They lost whatever was left of their shrinking political-clout sometime around the 2000 Coronation of George Bush.

In any event, Baker and his ilk are not going to sit back and watch the empire (and the military) they put together with their own two hands be systematically pulverized by a cabal of zealots pursuing an agenda that only serves Israeli hardliners. That ain’t gonna happen.

Expect Baker to wheel out the heavy artillery and fight tooth-and-nail to reassert the primacy of the American ruling class. "The Lobby" may be powerful, but it’s going to be tough-going to take the country away from the people who believe they own it. The struggle between the political heavyweights is about to break-out into open warfare.

a final solution

As the Iraqi civil war (euphemistically termed "sectarian violence") intensifies, both US and Iraqi casualties have sharply increased. Thirty-five US troops have been killed in the first week of December. Iraqis are dying at each other’s hands at about 100 per day, with many more wounded by bombs. Iraqi civilians continue to suffer at the hands of the US military, with the latest news being a US air strike that wiped out two families totaling 32 people.

The report from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group has made it plain as day that the US is accomplishing nothing in Iraq except the destabilization of the entire Middle East. As Middle East expert Anthony Sullivan writes in The National Interest, the ISG report "constitutes a massive repudiation of the policy of the Bush Administration." The war is lost and cannot be retrieved militarily. "Staying the course" is the path of total folly.

Yet, the White House Moron says that it is better for 100 US troops and 3,000 Iraqi civilians to die every month than for him to admit that he is wrong. The report from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group has made it plain as day that the US is accomplishing nothing in Iraq except the destabilization of the entire Middle East.

As long as Bush remains in office, the neoconservatives will demand more wars. In the current issue of "Foreign Policy," neocon Joshua Muravchik stridently insists that Bush bomb Iran before he leaves office. Muracvchik urges his fellow neocon warmongers to "pave the way" for the bombing of Iran and to "be prepared to defend the action when it comes."
Sounds like a case for impeachment, doesn't it.

no hate laws

On Oct. 7, 1998, a young man with dreams of helping others became a symbol of hate and bigotry in America. At 21, Matthew Shepard was lured from a local college bar by two men, taken by car into a remote area of Laramie, Wyo., strung up on a ranch fence, beaten beyond recognition and left to die in subzero temperatures.

His attackers, 22-year-old Aaron McKinney and 21-year-old Russell Henderson—later convicted of felony murder and given double life sentences—killed him because he was gay.

His bloody body, nearly mistaken for a scarecrow, was not discovered for 18 hours. When the gruesome details of his death hit the headlines, it sparked demonstrations across America and calls for anti-hate-crime legislation.

Did you know that WYOMING IS STILL ONE OF FOUR STATES WITH NO HATE LAW ON THE BOOKS?

beck, prove yourself

CNN host Glenn Beck:
Said recently, to newly elected U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), a Muslim: "Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies."

Said, "I'm telling you, with God as my witness... human beings are not strong enough, unfortunately, to restrain themselves from putting up razor wire and putting you on one side of it. When things—when people become hungry, when people see that their way of life is on the edge of being over, they will put razor wire(concentration camps) up and just based on the way you look or just based on your religion, they will round you up".
"When things heat up, the profiling will only get worse, and the razor wire(concentration camps) will be coming."

When Beck is talking about "razor wire," he's talking about concentration camps—in the original sense of the word, places where masses of people are imprisoned "just based on the way you look or just based on your religion."

Since the overwhelming majority of U.S. Muslims are neither "murdering innocent people" nor "excusing the people who do," there's really nothing that they can do to avert Beck's threat that "the razor wire will be coming." And Beck is explicit that there's nothing non-Muslims can do to avoid locking Muslims up en masse.

Beck said, "The Hurricane Katrina refugees seen on TV and the father of a terrorism victim were both "scumbags"

Contrary to Beck's suggestion, there are things that the people of the U.S. can do to avoid repeating the "grotesque" history of Japanese-American internment. One of these things is to take people seriously when they start threatening people with concentration camps—rather than looking the other way because of their ratings "success."

Please contact CNN/U.S. president Jonathan Klein and urge him to condemn Glenn Beck's chilling threats against Muslims. ALSO, I CHALLENGE BECK TO PROVE TO ME THAT HE IS NOT A FACIST NAZI.

another Iraq update

U.S. price tag is currently at least $348 billion of our money and "at least 2,920(+14 since last update) " members of the U.S. military have died, not counting (1)"contractors" (2) Iraqi civilian women and children (3) the tens of thousands that have been wounded, and (4) the one in five surviving soldiers that have lingering mental problems.Let's never forget it is the Republicans who got us in and are keeping us in this mess.

HAVE YOU READ OR HEARD THIS ON TV?? SO, WHY ISN'T THE "MEDIA" KEEPING AND PUBLISHING THESE STATS???

imagine the discussions in that family

Mary Cheney, a daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, is expecting a baby with her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe. Mr. Cheney’s office said Wednesday. Mary Cheney, 37, is a vice president at AOL; Ms. Poe, a former park ranger, is 45. Another reason not to have AOL. lol

how Liberty is lost

We cannot deny civil liberty to others and retain it for
ourselves. When zealous agents of the Government arrest suspected
"radicals" without warrant, hold them without prompt trial, deny them
access to counsel, we have shorn the Bill of Rights of its sanctity.

History teaches us that liberty is eroded in bits and pieces.
It's only a matter of time until they come for you and me.
Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among people.

Research the Carlyle Group and you will be outraged about the depth of
corruption and deceit within the highest ranks of our government.

what's wrong with McCain?

Iraq's Shiite leadership brought al-Sadr into their coalition. Now, frustrated by his influence on the government, McCain said "I think he needs to be taken out."

Killing al-Sadr would immediately create a renewed worldwide backlash against the U.S. It would also be an enormous gift to Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists, giving them a new martyr and reinforcing the stereotype of Americans as bloodthirsty and lawless.
Al-Sadr's death would deprive future Iraqi leaders of a critical bargaining partner. It would be the equivalent of a newly-elected Ronald Reagan assassinating Brezhnev, instead of negotiating with him.
Most importantly, it would turn many more Shiites into active participants in the insurgency. Al-Sadr is the son of a beloved Grand Ayatollah, in a culture that believes holiness runs in families. For many Iraqi Shiites, it would be the equivalent of murdering someone who is the combination of Pope John Paul and Abraham Lincoln.
We may not like Moqtada al-Sadr's ideas, but his influence is undeniable. McCain was talking loony talk here. Whether he was serious, or just throwing red meat to conservatives, it was foolish, irresponsible, and un-Presidential.

Speaking of the Iraq Study Group's search for a compromise solution to ending the war, McCain was contemptuous: "Well in war, my dear friends, there is no such thing as compromise; you either win or you lose."

Here's a simple truth about war. If you don't know how to win one and you don't intend to negotiate, there's only one other option left: defeat." McCain's "strategy" can only end in failure. Does he know that? Does he care? Does anything matter except promoting his presidential chances?
The mainstream media is working overtime to elect John McCain. They're telling you he's a "straight talker," despite his self-serving and politically motivated about-faces - on torture, on the religious right, even regarding racist attacks on his own family during the 2000 primaries. And there's always more - like his embarrassing (and clearly politically-motivated) flip-flop on ethanol. Yet the political pundits still claim McCain's a straight shooter.

Here's what they won't tell you: President John McCain would be every bit as unstable, dangerous, and cynical as the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld axis he hopes to replace. The press played a big part in electing the people who got us into today's mess. Now they're working hard to elect someone who may, in fact, be just as dangerous - or more so.

Bill of Rights in the Constitution

Here are the Bill of Rights to our Constitution before Republicans complete their destruction:
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Amendment II
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
Amendment III
No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense. Amendment VII
In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
Amendment VIII
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

update Iraq

U.S. price tag is currently at least $348 billion of our money and "at least 2,906(+12 since last update) " members of the U.S. military have died, not counting (1)"contractors" (2) Iraqi civilian women and children (3) the tens of thousands that have been wounded, and (4) the one in five surviving soldiers that have lingering mental problems.Let's never forget it is the Republicans who got us in and are keeping us in this mess. HAVE YOU READ OR HEARD THIS ON TV?? SO, WHY ISN'T THE "MEDIA" KEEPING AND PUBLISHING THESE STATS???

republicans, Iraq, insanity?

Tens of millions of Americans want President George W. Bush to be impeached for the lies and deceit he used to launch an illegal war and for violating his oath of office to uphold the US Constitution. Millions of other Americans want Bush turned over to the war crimes tribunal at the Hague. The true fate that awaits Bush is psychiatric incarceration. The President of the United States is so deep into denial that he is no longer among the sane.

Delusion still rules Bush three weeks after the American people repudiated him and his catastrophic war in elections that delivered both House and Senate to the Democrats in the hope that control over Congress would give the opposition party the strength to oppose the mad occupant of the White House.

Bush has destroyed the entire social, political, and economic fabric of Iraq. Saddam Hussein sat on the lid of Pandora’s Box of sectarian antagonisms, but Bush has opened the lid. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed as "collateral damage" in Bush’s war to bring "stable democracy" to Iraq.

Tens of thousands of Iraqi children have been orphaned and maimed. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have fled their country. The Middle East is aflame with hatred of America, and the ground is shaking under the feet of American puppet governments in the Middle East. US casualties (killed and wounded) number 25,000. And Bush has not had enough!
What better proof of Bush’s insanity could there be?

update Iraq-more killed

U.S. price tag is currently at least $348 billion of our money and "at least 2,894(+6) " members of the U.S. military have died, not counting (1)"contractors" (2) Iraqi civilian women and children (3) the tens of thousands that have been wounded, and (4) the one in five surviving soldiers that have lingering mental problems.
Let's never forget it is the Republicans who got us in and are keeping us in this mess.

Republicans in bed with Big Oil

DURING a 22-year career, Bobby L. Maxwell routinely won accolades and awards as one of the Interior Department’s best auditors in the nation’s oil patch, snaring promotions that eventually had him supervising a staff of 120 people.

He and his team scrutinized the books of major oil producers that collectively pumped billions of dollars worth of oil and gas every year from land and coastal waters owned by the public. Along the way, the auditors recovered hundreds of millions of dollars from companies that shortchanged the government on royalties.

"Mr. Maxwell’s career has been characterized by exceptional performance and significant contributions," wrote Gale A. Norton, then the secretary of the interior, in a 2003 citation. Ms. Norton praised Mr. Maxwell’s "perseverance and leadership" while cataloguing his "many outstanding achievements."

Less than two years later, the Interior Department eliminated his job in what it called a "reorganization." That came exactly one week after a federal judge in Denver unsealed a lawsuit in which Mr. Maxwell contended that a major oil company had spent years cheating on royalty payments.

Invoking a law that rewards private citizens who expose fraud against the government, Mr. Maxwell has filed a suit in federal court in Denver against the Kerr-McGee Corporation. The suit accuses the company, which was recently acquired by Anadarko Petroleum, of bilking the government out of royalty payments. It also contends that the Interior Department ignored audits indicating that Kerr-McGee was cheating. Three other federal auditors, who once worked for Mr. Maxwell and still work at the Interior Department, have since filed similar suits of their own against other energy companies.

In February, the Interior Department admitted that energy companies might escape more than $7 billion in royalty payments over the next five years because of errors in leases signed in the 1990s that officials are now scrambling to renegotiate. The errors were discovered in 2000, but were ignored for the next six years and have yet to be fixed.

Several of the nation’s biggest oil producers, including Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell and ConocoPhillips, failed in an effort to block Mr. Maxwell’s suit, arguing before an appellate judge that his case would "open the floodgates" to suits by other federal auditors. But the court rejected their pleas, and a trial is set to start on Jan. 16.

update Iraq

U.S. price tag is currently at least $347 billion of our money and "at least 2,888 " members of the U.S. military have died, not counting (1)"contractors" (2) Iraqi civilian women and children (3) the tens of thousands that have been wounded, and (4) the one in five surviving soldiers that have lingering mental problems. Let's never forget it is the Republicans who got us in and are keeping us in this mess.

Republicans are idiots

There is no iron law of history that says that the bad relations between America and the Islamic world, and even between the United States and radical Shiite groups like the one led by the militant cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, are fated to continue this way indefinitely and immutably.

Nor is there any reason to believe that an American withdrawal from Iraq will harm these relations any more than the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam permanently damaged U.S.-Vietnamese relations.

We are not leaving Iraq because neo-cons(who control the party) think that doing so would be admitting they goofed. We know that already. Meanwhile who is going to be the last soldier to be counted dead, not to mention the contractors and innocent Iraqi women and children.

Republicans creating a torture country

Murat Kurnaz, 24, a German cititzen held for four years without being charged with so much as a traffic violation, described life at Gitmo to CNN after being sent back to Germany. Among the "many types of torture" he endured were "electric shocks to having one's head submerged in water, (subjection to) hunger and thirst, or being shackled and suspended [hung from the ceiling]."

"They tell you 'you are from al-Qaeda', and when you say 'no' they give the (electric) current to your feet ... As you keep saying 'no' this goes on for two or three hours."

In testimony consistent with that of other Gitmo survivors, Kurnaz said he was suspended from the ceiling for at least four days. "They take you down in the mornings when a doctor comes to see whether you can endure more. They let you sit when the interrogator comes ... They take you down about three times a day so you do not die." Such precautions weren't 100 percent effective. "I saw several people die," he said.

Now the United States is trying to burnish its nasty image as one of the world's leading torture states--not by eliminating torture, but by silencing its victims. In a remarkable bit of legal sang-froid, the Bush Administration has filed a brief in its case against Majid Khan asking a federal court to seal its torture of him as "top secret."

Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd has introduced a bill to defang the neofascist Military Commissions Act, signed into law by Bush shortly before the elections. Under the MCA, the president or secretary of defense can declare anyone, including a U.S. citizen, an "enemy combatant" and toss them into a secret prison for the rest of their life, where they can legally be tortured.

The MCA also eliminates habeas corpus, a legal right enjoyed by Westerners since the 13th century that forces police to file charges against an arrestee or let him go.

update Iraq

Number of U.S. Military Personnel Sacrificed (Officially acknowledged)
In Bush's War 2885.

bush and hitler

"I BELIEVE that God wants me to be president." George W. Bush=
"I would like to thank Providence and the Almighty for choosing me of all people to be allowed to wage this battle for Germany," Hitler - Berlin March, 1936=

God is not on the side of any nation, yet we know He is on the side of justice. Our finest moments [as a nation] have come when we faithfully served the cause of justice for our own citizens, and for the people of other lands.: George W. Bush=
If we pursue this way, if we are decent, industrious, and honest, if we so loyally and truly fulfill our duty, then it is my conviction that in the future as in the past the Lord God will always help us: Adolf Hitler, at the Harvest Thanksgiving Festival on the Buckeburg held on 3 Oct. 1937.

"Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them." George W. Bush =
"Never in these long years have we offered any other prayer but this: Lord, grant to our people peace at home, and grant and preserve to them peace from the foreign foe!" : Hitler - Nuremberg Sept. 13, 1936.

Christian Coalition political agenda

For the second time in little more than a year, the Christian Coalition of America named a new leader and then removed him before he ever fully took the reins of the conservative political advocacy group.

The Rev. Joel Hunter, pastor of a nondenominational megachurch in Longwood, Fla., said he resigned as the coalition's incoming president because its board of directors disagreed with his plan to broaden the organization's agenda. In addition to opposing abortion and same-sex marriage, Hunter, 58, wanted to take on such issues as poverty, global warming and HIV/AID.

It tell us a lot about their political agenda.

why we vote

I think the American people got really tired and fatigued with the arrogance and style of this administration. There is an old saying ‘If you want to get elected, learn to speak. If you want to stay elected, learn to listen.’ "

Similarly, exit polls showed that about 37 percent of the voters who cast their votes against Republican candidates did so as a protest against Bush personally. Voters seemed to conclude that after six years of "staying the course" with unbendable will, while showering even the most benign critics with contempt and derision.

Bush and his Congressional allies had simply lost the capacity to fix their own mistakes. More interested in being right than in being reasonable, they seemed unable to respond to a range of emerging threats, from a hurricane on the gulf coast to an underground explosion on the Korean Peninsula.

To keep going around and saying that everything’s great and how it’s all going well in Iraq was ridiculous. There’s such a thing as being firm, and then there’s such a thing as ignoring reality."
If this election was about the cost of arrogance, though, then it should also be viewed as a vindication of the much-maligned American voter.

Thoughtful and dynamic leadership, after all, requires a willingness to negotiate and a tolerance for dissent — which is the main reason that Republicans now find themselves glumly packing boxes rather than gleefully continuing to pack the courts.

Iran/Contra scandal neo-cons at it again

It's the 20th anniversary of the Iran-contra scandal. Two decades ago, the public learned about the bizarre, Byzantine and (arguably) unconstitutional actions of high officials in the post-Watergate years. But many Americans did not absorb the key lesson: the Iran/contra vets were not to be trusted.
Consequently, most of those officials went on to prosperous careers, with some even becoming part of the squad that has landed the United States in the current hellish mess in Iraq.

Twenty years later, Abrams is deputy national security adviser for global democracy in the George W. Bush administration. A fellow who admitted that he had not told Congress the truth and who had abetted a secret war mounted by a rebel force with an atrocious human rights record now is supposed to promote democracy abroad. Other Iran/contra figures are leading players today. Here's a partial list from the National Security Archive:

* Richard Cheney - now the vice president, he played a prominent part as a member of the joint congressional Iran-Contra inquiry of 1986, taking the position that Congress deserved major blame for asserting itself unjustifiably onto presidential turf. He later pointed to the committees' Minority Report as an important statement on the proper roles of the Executive and Legislative branches of government.

* David Addington - now Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, and by numerous press accounts a stanch advocate of expanded presidential power, Addington was a congressional staffer during the joint select committee hearings in 1986 who worked closely with Cheney.

* John Bolton - the controversial U.N. ambassador whose recess appointment by President Bush is now in jeopardy was a senior Justice Department official who participated in meetings with Attorney General Edwin Meese on how to handle the burgeoning Iran-Contra political and legal scandal in late November 1986. There is little indication of his precise role at the time.

* Robert M. Gates - President Bush's nominee to succeed Donald Rumsfeld, Gates nearly saw his career go up in flames over charges that he knew more about Iran-Contra while it was underway than he admitted once the scandal broke. He was forced to give up his bid to head the CIA in early 1987 because of suspicions about his role but managed to attain the position when he was re-nominated in 1991.

* Manuchehr Ghorbanifar - the quintessential middleman, who helped broker the arms deals involving the United States, Israel and Iran ostensibly to bring about the release of American hostages being held in Lebanon, Ghorbanifar was almost universally discredited for misrepresenting all sides' goals and interests. Even before the Iran deals got underway, the CIA had ruled Ghorbanifar off-limits for purveying bad information to U.S. intelligence. Yet, in 2006 his name has resurfaced as an important source for the Pentagon on current Iranian affairs, again over CIA objections.

* Michael Ledeen - a neo-conservative who is vocal on the subject of regime change in Iran, Ledeen helped bring together the main players in what developed into the Iran arms-for-hostages deals in 1985 before being relegated to a bit part. He reportedly reprised his role shortly after 9/11, introducing Ghorbanifar to Pentagon officials interested in exploring contacts inside Iran.

* Edwin Meese - currently a member of the blue-ribbon Iraq Study Group headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, he was Ronald Reagan's controversial attorney general who spearheaded an internal administration probe into the Iran-Contra connection in November 1986 that was widely criticized as a political exercise in protecting the president rather than a genuine inquiry by the nation's top law enforcement officer.

* John Negroponte - the career diplomat who worked quietly to boost the U.S. military and intelligence presence in Central America as ambassador to Honduras, he also participated in efforts to get the Honduran government to support the Contras after Congress banned direct U.S. aid to the rebels. Negroponte's profile has risen spectacularly with his appointments as ambassador to Iraq in 2004 and director of national intelligence in 2005.

a war criminal?

THE bombing of a Pakistani madrasah last month, in which 82 students were killed, was carried out by the United States, a Pakistani official has admitted. The madrasah in the tribal agency of Bajaur was bombed during a visit to Pakistan by the Prince of Wales amid allegations that it was being used to train suicide bombers.

"We thought it would be less damaging if we said we did it rather than the US," said a key aide to President Pervez Musharraf. "But there was a lot of collateral damage and we’ve requested the Americans not to do it again."

The Americans are believed to have attacked after thinking that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deputy leader of Al-Qaeda, was present. Local people claimed the victims included boys as young as 12 and that the tribal area had been negotiating with the Pakistan government for a peace deal.

This act would have had to have been approved by Bush. So much for winning the hearts and minds. A war criminal--you tell me???

report may just cover Bush's ass

The New York Times is reporting this morning that a draft report of the Baker Commission, aka the Iraq Study Group, makes exactly the recommendations that most analysts have expected for months: more diplomacy, particularly with Iran and Syria; and no timetables for withdrawal of U.S. troops.

The latter, according to reporter David Sanger, citing unnamed commission members and outsiders, is likely to prove divisive when the ISG meets today to begin debating the contents of the final report. So what else could be expected from a "bipartisan" commission full of ideologues.

The draft report, according to those who have seen it, seems to link American withdrawal to the performance of the Iraqi military, as President Bush has done.

But details of the performance benchmarks, which were described as not specific, could not be obtained, and it is this section of the report that, unless revised, will just be a cover for Bush's ass to continue not admitting his goof by "staying the course" while we ljust keep losing people and treasure down that rat hole.

update Iraq

U.S. price tag of $346 billion of our money and "at least 2,876 " members of the U.S. military have died, not counting (1)"contractors" (2) Iraqi civilian women and children (3) the tens of thousands that have been wounded, and (4) the one in five surviving soldiers that have lingering mental problems. Let's never forget it is the Republicans who got us in and are keeping us in this mess.

Republicans continue

Even Medicaid, the federal health program for the poor, appears to employ better negotiators than the private Medicare plans. On Jan. 1, 6 million elderly and disabled people were switched from Medicaid pharmacy plans to the new Medicare program.

Overnight, many drugmakers began selling the same drugs at higher prices. Pfizer, for example, reported saving $325 million in Medicaid discounts during the first six months of this year "due primarily to the impact of" the Medicare drug benefit, according to a company report to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

"At some point, someone has to stand up to these industries that are doing so well in this program," said Robert M. Hayes, president of the Medicare Rights Center, a New York advocacy group. "It only makes sense that if the industries do less well, the taxpayers and the consumers will do better."

John C. Rother, policy director for AARP, the powerful lobby for elderly Americans, said he has no doubt that the next Congress (with the Democrats) will give government some role in negotiating Medicare drug prices. "This is an idea that's favored by 90 percent of the American public," Rother said. "It's not like you have to convince the American public that this is a good idea."

Already, the Republicans are gearing up to fight the idea of negotiating medicare drug prices.

republican party realignment

The Republican base, the true "red America" is now mostly limited to the deep South, which is made up of and controlled mostly by racists that have converted to the Republicans. The libertarian West is wary of Republicans in bed with the Southern Evangelicals. More states are now more blue than red. So is the populist MidWest, which distrusts the GOP alliance with big business and multinational corporations.
The bottom line is that the Republican Party has become the party of Rove and Bush, who appeal mostly to the Southern Bible Belt.

Democratic Agenda for the people

Democratic goals in the new Congress include:
_Restore civility, integrity, transparency and accountability to our government
_Increase the minimum wage.
_Enacting the Sept. 11 Commission's security recommendations.
_Allow the government to negotiate drug prices for Medicare patients.
_Cut energy industry tax breaks.
_Lower financial hurdles for access to higher education.
_Address the concerns and issues that affect the lives of working families,

republicans waste billions

HE DEPARTMENT of Homeland Security is an MBA's nightmare. When Congress cobbled DHS together in 2002, it took apart and reassembled elements from disparate federal agencies into an uneasy consolidation, too big and too varied, some say, for even the department's tireless head, Michael Chertoff, to adequately control. Instead of synergy, a fair measure of incompetence followed, including, The Post reported Wednesday, embarrassingly poor oversight of the billions of dollars the department has paid to private.

According to the review, which was drafted by outside specialists on government contracting, almost none of the contract files examined met standards of quality or even completeness. The documentation for 33 of 72 contracts the investigators sought to evaluate could not even be located, which makes you wonder how DHS ensures that contractors aren't wasting government money.

Poor contract management, the report concluded, has led to "the inability to obtain quality goods and services on time and at a fair price." These contracts date from fiscal 2005, during which DHS distributed nearly $17.5 billion to contractors and the federal government ran a deficit of $318 billion.
Another example of these republicans giving the most to those who have the most.

Cheney in the dark

Vice President Dick Cheney arrived Saturday in Saudi Arabia for talks with King Abdullah, apparently seeking the Sunni royal family’s influence and tribal connections to calm Iraq after an especially violent week.
Under the table, he may be seeking Saudi Arabia private agreement for the US to attack Iran.

McCain on the fence

The conservative movement is in a real meltdown since the election. Conservatives have been so wedded to this White House that they don’t know which way to turn for ’08. This will be the first election since 1922 where there is no sitting president or vice president on the ballot. President Bush has been derelict in positioning a successor, and thankfully so, since the policies he advocated have brought America worldwide condemnation and deserve to be retired with him.

There is no conservative darling to capture the hearts of the right, no candidate who can check off all their boxes. McCain was clearly squirming when ABC’s George Stephanopoulos pressed him on "This Week" last weekend about whether he supports civil unions, a loaded term among social conservatives who see it as a fig leaf for gay marriage.

McCain avoided the phrase but said he supported various partnerships to facilitate hospital visits and the like. His home state of Arizona just voted down an anti-gay marriage initiative that also would have banned domestic partnerships even among heterosexual couples.

The state’s large retired population took the lead in defeating the measure. Many older couples opt to live together rather than marry to keep their retirement incomes intact.

situation in Iraq

The media’s "spin" cannot alter the reality on the ground, and the fact is the US is getting beaten quite badly. They’ve locked-horns with a crafty enemy that has neutralized their advantages in terms of firepower and technology and limited their range of movement. It’s shocking to think that after 4 years of bloody conflict, occupation forces still control "no ground" beyond the looming parapets of the Green Zone. This is a stunning admission of defeat.

The benchmarks for winning a guerilla-type war are fairly well known. The occupying army must quickly establish security in order to elicit the support of the general population. That’s why winning "hearts and minds" is such a critical task. If the occupation is widely unpopular, then reconstruction and security become impossible, and the armed-struggle flourishes.

Now that 80% of the Iraqi people say that they want to see a rapid draw-down of American troops, we can be certain that victory, in any conventional sense of the word, is out of the question.

Without knowing the answers to these questions, the United States, with all its high-tech surveillance gadgetry, is just a lumbering giant stumbling around aimlessly. The dependence on rounding up and torturing "military aged men" (MAMs) to gather intelligence about resistance activities and networks has backfired entirely; galvanizing the public against the occupation and eroding America’s claim of moral superiority.

update Iraq

U.S. price tag of $345 billion of our money and "at least 2,871 " members of the U.S. military have died, not counting (1)"contractors" (2) Iraqi civilian women and children (3) the tens of thousands that have been wounded, and (4) the one in five surviving soldiers that have lingering mental problems.

Friedman-republican hero

Milton Friedman's folly:--His "free market" faith has produced instead the very thing he regularly denounced: a bastardized system of interest-group politics that serves favored sectors of citizens at the expense of many others.

Enterprise and markets were indeed set "free" of government regulation, but big government did not go away (it grew bigger). Only now government acts mainly as patron and protector for the largest, most powerful interests--the same ones that demanded their liberation.

Instead of serving the broad general welfare, government enables capital and corporations to feed off the taxpayers' money and convert public assets into private profit centers, shielded from the wrath of any citizens trying to object. If that is what Friedman really had in mind, he should have said so.

republican hypocrisy

Advocating war is easier when you and your family are not endangered by it. I've reached a Rangel-like breaking point with those TV pundits who championed the Iraq war and now say we can't leave even if we went there for the wrong reasons.

For every one of them, I have a simple question: Why aren't you in Iraq? Or why did you avoid combat in your generation's war?

The one unifying characteristic that all of those on TV shows share is fear of combat. Every one of them has done everything we can to avoid combat or even being fitted for a military uniform. Just check out the website www.nhgazette.com/news/chickenhawks/ and you will find Bush, Cheney, and all the neocons who avoided or evaded combat.

It takes a very special kind of combat coward to advocate combat for others. It's the kind of thing that can get you as angry as Charlie Rangel, a wounded and decorated combat veteran.

immorality

Hashim Ibrahim Awad was in his house last April, and the soldiers were American. Seven Marines and a Navy corpsman dragged Awad from his home in Hamdaniyah, west of Baghdad. They bound his hands and feet, though Awad is lame, and forced him outside. Four of them then shot him in the face.

Afterwards, the soldiers placed a shovel and an AK-47 by Awad's body to make it look like he was an insurgent digging a hole for a roadside bomb. The real motive for the killing remains unknown.

Lance Cpl. Jerry E. Shumate Jr. was one of the shooters. He was sentenced yesterday to 21 months in jail. That's significantly less than the five-year federal minimum sentence for growing a single marijuana plant. None of Shumate's co-conspirators has received a longer sentence (though some have yet to be tried).

An Iraqi life is worth less than a victimless crime. How much is saving these young soldiers' asses really worth to the military?

how corporations scam us

How have multinational drug companies been able to gouge us for years selling expensive drugs and then avoid paying tax on their astronomical profits?

The answer is simple. For companies in certain businesses, such as pharmaceuticals, it is very easy to simply "invent" the price a company charges their U.S. business for buying the company’s product which they manufacture in another country. And if they charge enough, poof; all the profit vanishes from the US, or Canada, or any other regular jurisdiction and end up in a corporate tax-haven. And that means American and Canadian tax payers don’t get their fair share.

Many multinational corporations essentially have two sets of bookkeeping. One set, with artificially inflated transfer prices is what they use to prepare local tax returns, and show auditors in high-tax jurisdictions, and another set of books, in which management can see the true profit and lost statement, based on real cost of goods, are used for the executives to determine the actual performance of their various operations.

The drug industry, where real cost of goods to manufacture drugs is usually around 5% of selling price, has a lot of room to artificially increase that cost of goods to 50% or 75% of selling price. This money is then accumulated in corporate tax-havens where the drugs are manufactured, such as Puerto Rico and Ireland. Puerto Rico has for many years attracted lots of pharmaceutical plants and Ireland is the new destination for such facilities, not because of the skilled labor or the beautiful scenery or the great beer—but because of the low taxes.

Ireland has, in fact, one of the world’s lowest corporate tax rates with a maximum rate of 12.5 percent. In Puerto Rico, over a quarter of the country’s gross domestic product already comes from pharmaceutical manufacturing. That shouldn’t be surprising. According to the U.S. Federal Tax Reform Act of 1976, manufacturers are permitted to repatriate profits from Puerto Rico to the U.S. free of U.S. federal taxes. And by the way, the Puerto Rico withholding tax is only 10%.

The problem starts when they use fraudulent transfer pricing and other tricks to artificially shift their income from the U.S. to a tax-haven. According to current OECD guidelines transfer prices should be based upon the arm’s length principle – that means the transfer price should be the same as if the two companies involved were indeed two independents, not part of the same corporate structure. Reality is that standard operating procedure for multinationals is to consistently violate this rule. Republicans are bought and paid for by these corporations and their fundamentalist Christian allies.

republcan war

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has said US forces are trapped in Iraq, adding that Washington must find the right time to leave without. "On the question of the military presence it is a difficult issue. The US is in a way trapped in Iraq, trapped in the sense that it cannot stay and it cannot leave," Annan told a press conference Tuesday.

update Iraq

U.S. price tag of $344 billion of our money and "at least 2,867 " members of the U.S. military have died, not counting (1)"contractors" (2) Iraqi civilian women and children (3) the tens of thousands that have been wounded, and (4) the one in five surviving soldiers that have lingering mental problems.

Republicans want another war

A classified draft CIA assessment has found no firm evidence of a secret drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons, as alleged by the White House, a top US investigative reporter said on Saturday. Seymour Hersh, writing in an article for the November 27 issue of the magazine The New Yorker released in advance, reported on whether the administration of Republican President George W. Bush was more, or less, inclined to attack Iran after Democrats won control of Congress last week.

A month before the November 7 legislative elections, Hersh wrote, Vice President Dick Cheney attended a national-security discussion that touched on the impact of Democratic victory in both chambers on Iran policy. "If the Democrats won on November 7th, the vice president said, that victory would not stop the administration from pursuing a military option with Iran," Hersh wrote, citing a source familiar with the discussion.

Cheney said the White House would circumvent any legislative restrictions "and thus stop Congress from getting in its way," he said. The Democratic victory unleashed a surge of calls for the Bush administration to begin direct talks with Iran.

But the administration’s planning of a military option was made "far more complicated" in recent months by a highly classified draft assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency "challenging the White House’s assumptions about how close Iran might be to building a nuclear bomb," he wrote.

"The CIA found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency," Hersh wrote, adding the CIA had declined to comment on that story.

the difference

the first liberal

The First Liberal:

If Jesus of Nazareth was anything, he was an extraordinary friend of the down- trodden, definitely a Liberal, whose advocacy on their behalf so infuriated the ultra-Conservative religious and political leaders of his day that they had him killed to prevent the public from hearing the very liberal teaching that you will see quoted abundantly in Jesus' own words.

Those who actually know what the Bible says about the life and teaching of Jesus recognize that far from being like Jesus of Nazareth, today's "Religious Right" are much more like the kind of clerics who battled this revolutionary prophet from the day he opened his mouth until the day they had him nailed to a cross.

Although these people claim to represent Jesus Christ, they rarely quote him or follow his example. What they do instead is use his name ("in vain") to promote their ideas, ideas which Jesus himself did not teach, and might well have opposed.

Gandhi said it best, "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."

recommendations for Democratic Party

Drawing on bluster and hubris, Republican bullied Democrats into going along with the transfer of the federal tax burden from the rich to the middle class. Next they skillfully exploited Americans' fear and anger following the September 11th attacks to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. By 2004, Republicans had eliminated civil liberties that citizens of Western countries had enjoyed for hundreds of years, emasculating Congress and the Courts to create a "unified executive" form of government.

Most of the changes carried out by Bush's neoconservatives during his first term--new tax rates, USA-Patriot Act, two wars, pulling out of the Geneva Conventions, torture, domestic eavesdropping--will probably remain in force for decades. Their strategy of running roughshod over the Democrats worked. Democrats should cancel the tax cuts, close the torture camps, restore habeas corpus, get the NSA out of our email, yank our troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq.

bipartisanship?

The Bush administration has appointed, Eric Keroack, as a new chief of family-planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling organization and opposes contraception and is against distributing information promoting birth control.

Bush last week pushed the Senate to confirm John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations and this week renominated six candidates for appellate court judgeships who have previously been blocked by lawmakers. AND, he also wants more troops in Iraq. SO MUCH FOR REPUBLICAN PROMISES OF BIPARTISANSHIP..

get out of Iraq NOW!

President George Bush has told senior advisers that the US and its allies must make "a last big push" to win the war in Iraq and that instead of beginning a troop withdrawal next year, he may increase US forces by up to 20,000 soldiers, according to sources familiar with the administration's internal deliberations.

Mr Bush's refusal to give ground, coming in the teeth of growing calls in the US and Britain for a radical rethink or a swift exit, is having a decisive impact on the policy review being conducted by the Iraq Study Group chaired by Bush family loyalist James Baker.

MY QUESTIONS ARE , " HOW MANY HAVE TO DIE FOR THIS FIASCO IN IRAQ AND WHICH ONE OF THE NEO-CONS / CHICKENHAWKS IS GOING TO BE THE LAST MAN OR WOMAN TO VOLUNTEER TO DIE THERE???" "GET OUT NOW"

update Iraq

U.S. price tag of $342 billion of our money and "at least 2,863 "(5 more yesterday) members of the U.S. military have died, not counting (1)"contractors" (2) Iraqi civilian women and children (3) the tens of thousands that have been wounded, and (4) the one in five surviving soldiers that have lingering mental problems.

no more hunger under these republicans

The USDA said that 12 percent of Americans -- 35 million people -- were hungry because they could not put food on the table at least part of last year.. Beginning this year, the Republican controlled USDA has determined "very low food security" to be a more palatable description for that group.
Now that is just like these Republicans, call it something else and cover up the problem. It is a crime that people in this country have to go to bed humgry, period. Changing the terminology doesn't get rid of the problem.

update Iraq

U.S. price tag of $340 billion of our money and "at least 2,858 "(6 more yesterday) members of the U.S. military have died, not counting (1)"contractors" (2) Iraqi civilian women and children (3) the tens of thousands that have been wounded, and (4) the one in five surviving soldiers that have lingering mental problems.

church of the unwanted

Catholics and certain religious denominations are widening their denial of membership to certain people. It seems so contrary, at least to me, to the picture and posture of Jesus in the gospels," "Jesus's life and ministry were marked by radical hospitality, openness, vulnerability, and humility.

By contrast, Catholics and the Baptist State Convention is requiring their congreatations to magnify the message that certain types of people, as well as their friends and perhaps their fellow believers and family members are neither welcome nor worthy of a place at the table in their communities.

I think we need a new organization of faith that excepts you and asks you only to come as you are, to join an open communions. So, I am contemplating creating a new congregation of the faithful to be named, "International Church of the Unwanted".

republican caucus vs. a cactus

For a Republican party that has just been through a big loss, and whose commitment to minority voters is a question mark, elevating Lott seems like a dubious move. The voters of Virginia punished Republican Sen. George Allen for a racially insensitive comment, yet the GOP promotes Lott, whose utterance was equally offensive.

Lott said that if Thurmond had been elected president in 1948, "we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years …" Thurmond ran as a segregationist Dixiecrat, and Lott’s words were interpreted as racist.

This proves that the difference between the republican caucus and a cactus is that with a cactus "the pricks are on the outside.

republicans say we are making progress

Iraq's Health Ministry is a case study in how al-Sadr used his government role to consolidate his political and military support. Ministry-run hospitals have been used as a weapon against rival Sunnis, according to critics, such as Sunni lawmaker Mithal al-Alusi. "It's a jungle," al-Alusi says. "What (al-Sadr) has done with that ministry is criminal."
Last month, a Sunni man was taken to Kindi Hospital in central Baghdad for a gunshot wound, says Omar al-Jubouri, human rights director at the Iraqi Islamic Party. He was shot and killed in his hospital bed, al-Jubouri says. His brother went to retrieve the body. He brought 17 male relatives along for protection, but they were quickly outgunned by an even larger group of armed men, believed to be the Mahdi Army, al-Jubouri says. The group was kidnapped and killed, he adds.

Two days later, the family picked up the 19 bodies, escorted by an Iraqi army convoy, from the Baghdad morgue. Al-Jubouri says some of the bodies showed signs of torture, including drill holes to the skull and electrocution burns. So many Sunnis have been followed and killed after picking up relatives at the ministry-controlled Baghdad morgue that al-Jubouri's party regularly coordinates Iraqi army convoys to escort the families, he says. "We'll wait until we have 17 or 18 bodies waiting," he says. "Then we'll send for the convoy."

Convoys are not always safe. On June 12, Ali al-Mahdawi, a physician and head of the Diyala Province health department, arrived at the Health Ministry headquarters with six bodyguards for an 8:30 a.m. meeting with Health Minister Ali al-Shemari, al-Samarrai says.Al-Mahdawi had been nominated by Sunni political leaders to be deputy minister. After arriving at the ministry, three of the bodyguards waited in the parking lot, while three escorted the doctor to the meeting, al-Samarrai says. When the meeting ran late, a bodyguard in the parking lot called al-Mahdawi on his mobile phone.

"Don't worry, he's with friends," a voice on the other end said before switching off the phone. Al-Mahdawi and the three guards haven't been seen since, al-Samarrai says. "Most probably, he's dead now," he says. "It happens so often. Everybody knows about it. And they're not doing anything about it."

nobody cares

The day the shells fell, Athamneh's daughters Tamam and Najat had been sleeping in the house with their children, because their houses had been badly damaged during the last IDF invasion. No one is investigating whether they were hit by tanks or bulldozers, shells or missiles, or from an explosion when the soldiers blasted holes in the walls to pass between houses.

Four hundred homes were damaged in Beit Hanun in one week, including 25 that were completely destroyed.

The soldiers' invasion of the Athamneh family home has also been almost forgotten. At 10 A.M., on November 1, a tank entered the garden, destroying hothouses, trees, pipes and a generator, until it hit a wall. The soldiers made a hole in the wall and entered the house, gathered all the family members and sent the women to a room on the first floor. The men were put in the kitchen and bathroom.

The soldiers collected all the cell phones, and with leashed dogs, searched all the rooms on all four floors. They called out the names of all the family members. Majdi, Zahar's husband, has a pacemaker. He said he felt ill and asked the soldiers to call an ambulance. He overheard one say someone was sick. Another soldier responded, "Let him die."

Majdi showed the soldiers his medical papers. One of the soldiers hit him in the chest and his nose started bleeding. After two hours, the soldiers left. They returned three days later through the hole in the wall. They again gathered all the family members, counted them, searched and left after three hours.

"They knew very well who was in the house, how many children, how many women. They knew very well there were no terrorists and no arms in this house," said Majdi.

Majdi showed visitors the walls and ceilings hit by the shells, the clothes strewn by the blast, the broken furniture and concrete. "I believe the soldiers are happy they killed us," he said. "They had an order from [Defense Minister Amir] Peretz and [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert to kill us. They wouldn't do it without orders.

What kind of a mistake is it, if 10 shells hit one after the other, killing people in their beds? Not one shell was a mistake. I collected the martyrs. One by one. Avigdor Lieberman said Israel must act like the Russians in Chechnya. He just joined the government, and they immediately started doing what he said." War, War, War. AND NOBODY CARES.

good advice

Outgoing RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman's advice to Republicans:
We have to recommit ourselves to being the party of reform (party of change). Sounds like the Democratic Party.
Next is to say that people who are in public service ought to be about serving the public not aggrandizement for themselves, and certainly not for personal enrichmen. A big problem with the these current Republicans.
And three, try as hard as you can to work in a bipartisan way, consistent with principles, and make sure your tone is always a respectful tone. Just because someone disagrees with you is no reason to call them names.
This is a big fault of current Republicans. I have been pointing this out to Republicans for the last year and a half. All together, good advice.

stop hypocrisy

During the Vietnam war, American forces sprayed about 12 million gallons of Agent Orange over the jungle canopies and jade-green highlands of Vietnam. The most toxic of the herbicides used for military purposes, it defoliated countless trees in areas where the communist North Vietnamese troops hid supply lines and conducted guerrilla warfare.

Because Vietnam lacked the resources to conduct its own environmental cleanup, dioxin-related birth defects have been diagnosed in thousands of children whose parents were not exposed during the war.

The USA sprayed chemicals that still create birth defects in Vietnam.
I find it ironic that on one hand we put Saddam Hussein on trial for using biological warfare, but in another country where we sprayed chemicals for warfare, 30 years after, we still have not cleaned it up. Hypocrisy is alive and well and will be our downfall if we don't stop it.

a liberal and Christian

If by a liberal and a Christian, they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties.. if that is what they mean, then I am proud to be a liberal and a Christian

ways of republicans

People are finally seeing the ways in which Republican hypocrisy and cruelty support one another. Their whole ideological system--promotion of international and domestic state violence, homophobic moralism and religious zealotry, corruption and piety, prostitution of government to big business--is on the verge of collapse.

Politicians and lobbyists on their way to jail, right-wing preachers paying for the kind of sex they denounce, rampant profiteering, a disgraceful and chaotic war--they all add up to an obsolescent governing model.

reject republican ways

Democrats should avoid the overreaching, arrogance and rancorous partisanship that Democrats them virtually powerless on Capitol Hill and spawned an era of political corruption and influence-peddling. Democratic leaders vowed last week to pass major ethics reforms early in the new 110th Congress, and to offer Republicans seats at the negotiating table and ample opportunities to amend bills on the floor -- opportunities that were denied their party.

"What republicans did was very effective in pulling up all the ladders for any other party to gain the majority," incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said last week of the Gingrich revolutionaries. "They just shut the doors to debate on the floor, to amendments coming, to even how special orders [speeches] were conducted. Everything they were effective in using to gain the majority they shut down."

"We're going to do the opposite," she pledged.

don't be like those republicans

Democrats should avoid the overreaching, arrogance and rancorous partisanship that left Democrats virtually powerless on Capitol Hill and spawned an era of political corruption and influence-peddling.

Democratic leaders vowed last week to pass major ethics reforms early in the new 110th Congress, and to offer Republicans seats at the negotiating table and ample opportunities to amend bills on the floor -- opportunities that were denied their party.

"What they did was very effective in pulling up all the ladders for any other party to gain the majority," incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said last week of the Gingrich revolutionaries. "They just shut the doors to debate on the floor, to amendments coming, to even how special orders [speeches] were conducted. Everything they were effective in using to gain the majority they shut down."

"We're going to do the opposite," she pledged.

Demos to be different

Democrats should avoid the overreaching, arrogance and rancorous partisanship of Republicans that left them virtually powerless on Capitol Hill and spawned an era of political corruption and influence-peddling.

Democratic leaders vowed last week to pass major ethics reforms early in the new 110th Congress, and to offer Republicans seats at the negotiating table and ample opportunities to amend bills on the floor -- opportunities that were denied their party.

"What Republicans did was very effective in pulling up all the ladders for any other party to gain the majority," incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said last week of the Gingrich revolutionaries. "They just shut the doors to debate on the floor, to amendments coming, to even how special orders [speeches] were conducted. Everything they were effective in using to gain the majority, they shut down."

"We're going to do the opposite," she pledged.

are we dumb

Wes Anderson, a Republican strategist who consulted in some of the closest Senate races, said that before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, voters identified the GOP as the party of fiscal conservatism, middle-class economics, national security and ethical reform. "Our problem is our brand is broken," Anderson said. "Voters didn't walk away from the core principles of the brand. They just didn't think we represented them effectively." Rubbish.

Fiscal conservatism--they gave the biggest tax breaks to those who are richest and have the most,
Middle-class economics--the middle class is worse off with these republicans,
National security--turned Iraq into a killing field and a recruiting field for Al Quaeda,
and ethical reform--crookedness and immorality abound among republicans.

AND HE SAID "voters didn't think we represented them effectively" more B---S--t spin and hypocrisy from these republicans--they never learn because they think you are dumb.
Are you?

"me-to-ers"

The Democratic Party has been all but dead for years as a meaningful national alternative. The party has no recognized national leader. It has no cause, no fire in the belly. It has been largely silent for six years while Bush rampaged through the world and literally peed on American liberties like a grotesquely-smirking, small-town sheriff.

No President in history has shown so little respect for human rights, and with so little excuse, yet all the would-be defenders of the Republic, whether Congressmen or the Don't-Tread-on-Me crowd, have been no where to be seen. And Democrats like Lieberman or Kerry can hardly be distinguished from Republicans.

The Democrats have been elected because Americans are now sick of Iraq. Their enthusiasms die quickly. American expectations for the wars they start are perfectly captured by the image of Bush landing on an aircraft carrier with a big banner behind him saying Mission Accomplished.

Democrats better get on the stick and quit trying to be "me-to-ers" and get aggressive, go on the offense; or they will be just a blip on the radar screen, waiting for the "Republicrats" to return in two years.

cheney a "deadender"

This is all about Cheney now; Dick Cheney, political survivor and skilled bureaucratic infighter. If anyone thinks that he’s going to sit around waiting for the Democrats to start sniffing around the Republican corruption-cesspool; they’re crazy. He knows what’s going on. He knows that Bush Senior, and Brzezinski, and Baker, and the rest of the “old order” Republicans have muscled in and are taking over. He knows he won’t be able to bomb Iran, kill another 650,000 Iraqis, or declare martial law at home. And, he also knows that Conyers and the rest of them will be nosing-around the Halliburton “no bid” contracts; going through every sordid detail with a fine-tooth comb, and dredging up new scandals on a daily basis.

He grasps all of that. He understands the political climate and he knows that he only has two choices left; offense or defense? Either he steps down or he collects his wits, gets his team together; Addington, Abrams, Chertoff, Gonzales etc; all the guys who are “one step ahead of the hangman”; and slaps together one “last-ditch” effort to establish absolute-dictatorial power that will put him forever beyond the reach of the law or of any future accountability for his war crimes.

It’s a tough task. Bush is teetering and he’s probably left the Cheney-Rumsfeld orbit already. Robert Gates’ job is to influence Bush, to win him over with reason and, thus, move the country away from the brink of disaster. Cheney has been removed from the policy-making apparatus and he knows it. So, what’ll he do next? What will Cheney do now that he’s been backed into a corner and his power is oozing away like the blood from a sucking chest-wound?

Will he quietly retire and disappear into the political vapor or “lock-n-load” and go down with both guns blazing? Here’s a clue: Cheney is a “dead-ender”. He won’t go peacefully.

long but the best read

Well, someone's head had to roll -- not for our bloody defeat in Iraq, but for the GOP's defeat in the mid-terms. Well, I'm not celebrating. I know that most of my readers will be tickled pink that Donald Rumsfeld has been given the kiss-off. But let's get this straight:

It wasn't Rumsfeld who stood up in front of the UN and identified two mobile latrines as biological weapons labs, was it, General Powell? It wasn't Rumsfeld who told us our next warning from Saddam could be a mushroom cloud, was it Ms. Rice? It wasn't Rumsfeld who declared that al-Qaida and Saddam were going steady, was it, Mr Cheney?

Rummy's the puppet -- but the problem is the puppeteer. And the timing of this smells. Rather than gossip about the dunking of The Don, I'd rather focus on suspicious electoral arithmetic. In Virginia, only 7,000 votes separates the Democratic Senatorial candidate Jim Webb from incumbent Republican George Allen. Leading up to the election, the State of Virginia rejected more than 91,000 names submitted from voter drives, blocking their registrations.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School says that Virginia's methods of rejecting voters had a notably racial bias. Golly. Put the two numbers together -- the 91,000 citizens questionably barred from voting and the teeny-weeny Senate vote margin, and Virginia begins to look a lot like Florida on the Potomac.

The blockade of voters at the Virginia polling station doors followed on last year's promise of Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman to mount a, "challenge to voter eligibility" in Virginia. Mehlman vowed, through an attack on the voter rolls, to "do whatever we can" to keep control of Virginia. And he did. Voters blocked (and other purged from voter rolls) received "provisional ballots." The state only counts about 15% of these.

Americans didn't end up in a Vietnam on the Tigris because of Rumsfeld's failure of command. The problem was, and is, the failure of Rumsfeld's Commander-in-Chief.