June 30, 2008
May 29, 2008
May 15, 2008
May 14, 2008
April 10, 2008
Newest House Member Goes After Bush’s Iraq Policy On Her First Day
Salon, Kartarine Mieszkowski, April 10, 2008
Thursday, the day Rep. Jackie Speier, 57, was sworn into Congress, she wasted no time in pissing off Republicans, by blasting President Bush and Sen. John McCain in a speech about the war in Iraq.
“The process to bring the troops home must begin immediately,” Speier, a Democrat from Hillsbourgh, Calif., told members of Congress, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “The president wants to stay the course and a man who wants to replace him suggests we could be in Iraq for 100 years. But Madam Speaker, history will not judge us kindly if we sacrifice four generations of Americans because of the folly of one.”
While Democrats applauded, some Republicans booed, and a few walked out in protest, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Speier’s 13-year-old daughter, who was watching from the House Gallery, asked, “Why are they booing my mom?”
April 9, 2008
Robert Parry: Losing the War for Reality
Robert Parry, Consortium News, April 8, 2008
When future historians look back at the sharp decline of the United States in the early 21st Century, they might identify the Achilles heel of this seemingly omnipotent nation as its lost ability to recognize reality and to fashion policies to face the real world.
Like the legendary Greek warrior – whose sea-nymph mother dipped him in protective waters except for his heel – the United States was blessed with institutional safeguards devised by wise Founders who translated lessons from the Age of Reason into a brilliant constitutional framework of checks and balances.
What the Founders did not anticipate, however, was how fragile truth could become in a modern age of excessive government secrecy, hired-gun public relations and big-money media. Sophisticated manipulation of information is what would do the Republic in.
That is the crucial lesson for understanding the arc of U.S. history over the past three decades. It is a central theme of a new book by former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman, Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.
As a senior Kremlinologist in the CIA’s office of Soviet analysis, Goodman was on the front lines of the information war in the early 1980s when ideological right-wingers took control of the U.S. government under Ronald Reagan and began to gut the key institutions for assessing reality.
March 26, 2008
March 21, 2008
March 16, 2008
McCain and Lieberman Makes Unexpected Visit to Iraq
Bradley Brooks, The Associated Press, March 16, 2008
BAGHDAD — Sen. John McCain, the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee for president who has linked his political future to U.S. success in Iraq, was in Baghdad on Sunday for meetings with Iraqi and U.S. diplomatic and military officials, a U.S. government official said.
Details of McCain’s visit were not being released for security reasons, the U.S. embassy said.
McCain’s visit was not announced and he was believed to have been in the country for several hours before reporters were able to confirm his arrival. It was unclear who he met with and no media opportunities or news conferences were planned.
McCain, a strong supporter of the U.S. military mission in Iraq, is believed to be staying in the country for about 24 hours.
“Senator McCain is in Iraq and will be meeting with Iraqi and U.S. officials,” said Mirembe Nantongo, spokesperson for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
Maureen Dowd: Bush’s Soft Shoe in Hard Times
The New York Times, March 16, 2008
Everyone here is flummoxed about why the president is in such a fine mood.
The dollar’s crumpling, the recession’s thundering, the Dow’s bungee-jumping and the world’s disapproving, yet George Bush has turned into Gene Kelly, tap dancing and singing in a one-man review called “The Most Happy Fella.”
“I’m coming to you as an optimistic fellow,” he told the Economic Club of New York on Friday. His manner — chortling and joshing — was in odd juxtaposition to the Fed’s bailing out the imploding Bear Stearns and his own acknowledgment that “our economy obviously is going through a tough time,” that gas prices are spiking, and that folks “are concerned about making their bills.”
He began by laughingly calling the latest news on the economic meltdown “a interesting moment” and ended by saying that “our energy policy has not been very wise” and that there was “no quick fix” on gasp-inducing gas prices.
“You know, I guess the best way to describe government policy is like a person trying to drive a car in a rough patch,” he said. “If you ever get stuck in a situation like that, you know full well it’s important not to overcorrect, because when you overcorrect you end up in the ditch.”
March 13, 2008
March 7, 2008
Top Iraq Contractor Avoids Paying US Taxes Using Offshore Shells
The Boston Globe, March 6, 2008
CAYMAN ISLANDS – Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation’s top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven.
More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq – including about 10,500 Americans – are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands.
The Defense Department has known since at least 2004 that KBR was avoiding taxes by declaring its American workers as employees of Cayman Islands shell companies, and officials said the move allowed KBR to perform the work more cheaply, saving Defense dollars.
But the use of the loophole results in a significantly greater loss of revenue to the government as a whole, particularly to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. And the creation of shell companies in places such as the Cayman Islands to avoid taxes has long been attacked by members of Congress.
A Globe survey found that the practice is unusual enough that only one other major contractor in Iraq said it does something similar.
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Paul Krugman: The Anxiety Election
Paul Krugman, The New York Times, March 7, 2008
Democrats won the 2006 election largely thanks to public disgust with the Iraq war. But polls — and Hillary Clintons big victory in Ohio — suggest that if the Democrats want to win this year, they have to focus on economic anxiety.
Some people reject that idea. They believe that this election should be another referendum on the war, and, perhaps even more important, about the way America was misled into that war. That belief is one reason many progressives fervently support Barack Obama, an early war opponent, even though his domestic platform is somewhat to the right of Mrs. Clinton’s.
As an early war opponent myself, I understand their feelings. But should and ought don’t win elections. And polls show that the economy has overtaken Iraq as the public’s biggest concern.
True, the news from Iraq will probably turn worse again. Meanwhile, a hefty majority of voters continue to say that the war was a mistake, and people are as angry as ever about the $10 billion a month wasted on the neocons’ folly.
Yet for the time being, public optimism about Iraq is rising: 53 percent of the public believes that the United States will definitely or probably succeed in achieving its goals. So anger about the war isn’t likely to be decisive in the election.
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March 2, 2008
Helen Thomas: Time To Get Out Of Our Blood Debt In Iraq
Helen Thomas, The Hearst Newspapers, February 28, 2008
Will the next president be the second coming of Jimmy Carter? Given Thursday’s economic headlines, full of dire warnings about the return of 1970s-style stagflation, you might think so.
Bush wants to leave to the next president the burden of ending the debacle he started five years ago when he ordered the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, against a people who had done us no harm.
Bush cannot explain his reasons for the war without compounding his folly. To this moment, Bush has not given a logical explanation for his disastrous militarism.
How can he tell American families that their sons and daughters died for a terrible, tragic mistake committed by his administration?
History shows that other presidents have found ways to end U.S. involvement in wars. Most times there has been a public sigh of relief when that happens.
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The Tattlesnake – Big Media Continue to Excuse or Ignore ‘Honest John’s’ McCainery Edition
And Some Questions His BM Camp Followers Should Ask Their Republican Paramour
Political junkies and other perverse creatures who tempt aching necks following this tennis match between John McCain and Barack Obama already know that if Obama had made the glaring blunders McCain has been prone to, he would have been crucified by the Big Media Punditocracy and his political carcass left for the buzzards.
Let’s look at McCain’s recent spate of arrant gaffery, just on Iraq, where he’s been anointed by his friends in the BM as an ‘expert’:
1. McCain said an occupation of Iraq of a hundred years or more wouldn’t bother him. His Pundit Pals said he didn’t really mean that and it was taken out of context.
2. On four different occasions in a 24-hour period, McCain mixed up the Sunnis and Shia in Iraq. His BM buddies excused that by exasperatedly fuming, ‘Of course, John McCain knows the difference – after all, he’s a foreign policy expert! He just misspoke!’
3. McCain has claimed repeatedly that the surge is working, although there has been no recent official report to that effect, no US general on the ground in Iraq has made that statement, and Americans and Iraqis continue to die in attacks over there. I have yet to hear the BM challenge McCain on this unsupported assertion.
4. Then McCain said on the Today Show that it doesn’t really matter how long we have troops there. He’s since backtracked while his reliable Hallelujah chorus in the Corporate Media have echoed the GOP Talking Point that he was, again, ‘taken out of context.’
On June 12, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann had a Special Comment on McCain’s statements, showing with video clips how many times the Straight-Talk Express has been circling the cul-de-sac — right turns only, of course, ‘my friends’ — and that putting his remarks in context is even more frightening than dismissing them as the senile obfuscations and precinct-captain pandering of a doddering old political fossil. It sketches a picture of McCain as a remote and careless dauphin who really doesn’t give a fig about the troops he pretends to support. Leave ‘em in there to rot as an occupation force, as long as they’re not getting shot at. This is the antiquated foreign policy of a King George III or Kaiser Wilhelm II, not a modern American president.
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