Call John Sweeney The Wahhhhhhhmbulance

'Cause it's time for this very disturbed man to go home.

Albany Times-Union: On the Hill, the sound of silence
John Sweeney, still reeling from re-election loss to Kirsten Gillibrand, fails to show for votes

WASHINGTON -- Since losing re-election last month, Rep. John Sweeney has played hooky in Congress, skipping votes, dodging reporters and avoiding his new make-shift office in a basement cubicle set up for lame ducks.

Sweeney's friends and colleagues Capitol Hill say the Republican from Clifton Park is still stunned about the outcome of the Nov. 7 election when he lost to Democratic challenger Kirsten Gillibrand.

[]

Sessions [Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, a close friend of Sweeney's], asked why Sweeney was so angry and shocked about his loss, said: "John was disappointed that some frailties in his life were contributing issues to his defeat." He said Sweeney has been ill and his blood pressure had risen.

Sweeney believes he picked up "a bug" during congressional trips to Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Sessions.

"A bug got into his system and lodged in his brain," Sessions said. "It caused unimaginable pain and stress."

Hat tip to Talking Points Memo.

RIP Jeane Kirkpatrick

When I read all the dainty fawning obituaries of Jeane Kirkpatrick in the corporate press, I hoped someone in the progressive blogosphere would write up the real story: Iran-contra, death squads in El Salvador, funding the 'rebels' in Afghanistan [read: bin Laden]. And here it is:

dailykos: The Real Obituary of Jeane Kirkpatrick

[A] legacy of bloodshed, death and destruction.

My Heart Is Hard

Smoke rises after mortar attacks in Baghdad November 26, 2006. REUTERS/Mahmoud Raouf Mahmoud (IRAQ)
I still haven't forgiven Michael Moore for supporting Ralph Nader in 2000, for being so ignorant of history that he could say with a straight face that there's no difference between Republicans and Democrats, but this letter helps me towards my better nature:

Sunday, November 26th, 2006
Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do ...a letter from Michael Moore

Friends,

Tomorrow marks the day that we will have been in Iraq longer than we were in all of World War II.

That's right. We were able to defeat all of Nazi Germany, Mussolini, and the entire Japanese empire in LESS time than it's taken the world's only superpower to secure the road from the airport to downtown Baghdad.

And we haven't even done THAT. After 1,347 days, in the same time it took us to took us to sweep across North Africa, storm the beaches of Italy, conquer the South Pacific, and liberate all of Western Europe, we cannot, after over 3 and 1/2 years, even take over a single highway and protect ourselves from a homemade device of two tin cans placed in a pothole. No wonder the cab fare from the airport into Baghdad is now running around $35,000 for the 25-minute ride. And that doesn't even include a friggin' helmet.

[]

The Soviet Union got out of Afghanistan in 36 weeks. They did so and suffered hardly any losses as they left. They realized the mistake they had made and removed their troops. A civil war ensued. The bad guys won. Later, we overthrew the bad guys and everybody lived happily ever after. See! It all works out in the end!

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
H.L. Mencken

Listen to Eric Massa (NY-29)

Here's how a real military man would respond to the North Korean nuclear explosion:

1) Reconvene. President Bush should call an emergency session of Congress tonight to respond to this crisis. Last year, during the Schiavo family medical tragedy in Florida, the Congress reconvened in emergency session to pass a law that had nothing to do with national security, nothing to do with making America safer, nothing to do with the public welfare. Instead, they passed and signed a law in midnight session that purported to intervene in the private medical decisions of a family in crisis. If this Administration and its allies in Congress truly value life, truly value the security of this nation, then they ought to be able to give the same consideration to national defense.

2) Refocus. The obsessive focus on Iraq that has characterized the Bush Administration's approach to the world has left us willfully ignorant of ever changing political dynamics across the globe--particularly in East Asia. It is no longer sufficient to reduce the world to slogans and Axes of Evil--we must fundamentally refocus our efforts on a global level.

3) Redeploy. Over time, our military has been gradually withdrawn from bases in South Korea and repositioned to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This has had the dual effect of suggesting to the North Koreans that we are not committed to the defense of South Korea and of dramatically reducing our ability to exert force in that part of the world. In addition to redeploying our military, we must also redeploy the other facets of our international power--trade, diplomacy, and economic aid. The flow of resources in this government has been focused for too long upon a misguided and counterproductive war in Iraq to the detriment of our interests worldwide.

4) Re-energize. We must now seek to understand the motives and machinations of our adversaries even as we seek to reach out to our traditional allies in that region: Japan, Australia, and South Korea. Using these relationships, and employing skillful diplomacy instead of a reckless cowboy approach, we may be able to leverage our power, and that of China, to force North Korea to disarm.

He was on the Ed Schultz Show yesterday. Here's the audio.

Or read his diary on dailykos.

Check out his website.

Donate to him here on my ActBluepage.

And if you live in his district, vote for him in November! We need more voices of reason like Eric Massa in Congress.

Frist!

Bill Frist could be the worst politician in the history of politicians. I'm serious. The man has the instincts of an inanimate object. He put a fork in any presidential ambitions last night:

Washington Post (AP): Frist: Taliban Should Be in Afghan Gov't

QALAT, Afghanistan -- U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan war against Taliban guerrillas can never be won militarily and urged support for efforts to bring "people who call themselves Taliban" and their allies into the government.

The Tennessee Republican said he learned from briefings that Taliban fighters were too numerous and had too much popular support to be defeated on the battlefield.

"You need to bring them into a more transparent type of government," Frist said during a brief visit to a U.S. and Romanian military base in the southern Taliban stronghold of Qalat. "And if that's accomplished, we'll be successful."

So, I guess all that rhetoric over the last five years about how 9/11 changed everything, and any group that harbors terrorists will be treated as terrorists, and all that other Bush-neo-con-Rethug bullcrap, has been exposed as utter bullcrap. As you can imagine, the wingnuts are beside themselves. Some have even pledged to vote Democratic in November! Tee hee.

Apparently someone in Frist's camp smelled the defeatism and pulled back; too little, too late:

VOLPAC: America will Never Negotiate with Terrorists or Support their Entry into Afghanistan’s Government

In The News Today, Oh Boy

Sen. George Allen's, R-Va., black cowboy boots, left, are a contrast to Democrat Jim Webb's combat boots as the two appear for their first debate Sunday, Sept. 17, 2006, on NBC's 'Meet the Press' in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)[Actually, Webb's boots are the combat boots of his son Jimmy, 24, a lance corporal in the Marines, who shipped out to Iraq this month.]

Maybe I should be looking at real estate further north, like at the North Pole. Billmon discusses British scientist's James Lovelocks predictions that within 10 to 20 years, irreversable climate change will raise global temperatures by 10 degrees: And People Call Me a Pessimist

You know that Canadian citizen, completely innocent, that we tortured? He confessed to attending training camps in Afghanistan, even though he'd never been there. Yeah we need more bogus intelligence like that. Glenn Greenwald, The fruits of the President's interrogation policies

Senator Macaca, George Allen, freaked out when a reporter asked him about reports that his mother is Jewish (which would make him Jewish). I guess he was hoping it didn't come out: Allen's efforts to hide his Jewish roots

Gee, I can't imagine why women don't report sexual harassment in the workplace, when employers are so committed to stopping it. Like our government. In today's Washington Post, we read the story of a 22 year old woman who's been arrested for failing to report for a second tour in Iraq after she reported sexual harassment by her superiors. And in contrast, the story of how the U.S. Postal Service's public affairs chief, accused of sexual harassment by several subordinates, went on a 4-month paid vacation. And now says he is due another 2 months of paid vacation.

More not-news-to-those-of-us-of-the-female-persuasion: Report finds bias keeping women out of science jobs; Academia urged to tackle gap in faculty numbers

And the creepiest news story of the day: that the US intends to nuke Iran's nuclear facilities, then lie about it and say we didn't use nukes. Any radiation is from the facilities we bombed. Scariest of all: I believe George W. Bush and Dick Cheney capable of this.

We Love Lists

Project Censored has issued its list of the Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007 (the stories you should be reading about, but won't).

#1 Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media

#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran

#3 Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger

#4 Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US

#5 High-Tech Genocide in Congo

#6 Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy

# 7 US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq

#8 Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act

#9 The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall

#10 Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians

#11 Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed

#12 Pentagon Plans to Build New Landmines

#13 New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup

#14 Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in the US

#15 Chemical Industry is EPA’s Primary Research Partner

#16 Ecuador and Mexico Defy US on International Criminal Court

#17 Iraq Invasion Promotes OPEC Agenda

#18 Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story

#19 Destruction of Rainforests Worst Ever

#20 Bottled Water: A Global Environmental Problem

#21 Gold Mining Threatens Ancient Andean Glaciers

#22 $Billions in Homeland Security Spending Undisclosed

#23 US Oil Targets Kyoto in Europe

#24 Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3000 Percent Last Year

#25 US Military in Paraguay Threatens Region

Via BoingBoing

Beautiful Dead Girls

The stories you should be reading, while the news media obsesses over Jon Benet Ramsey; from dailykos:

Beautiful Dead Girls

by hrh

Mon Aug 21, 2006 at 08:19:05 PM PDT

[From the Diaries - MB]

We hear a lot about beautiful dead girls in the US media.  Here are some that we haven't heard about much.  Their smiles haven't been plastered over the supermarket tabloid press, and they're not likely to be.  One of the reasons is that they don't fit the popular stereotype of beautiful-woman-as-helpless-victim.  Another reason is that many people still haven't focused on the reality of women in the military.  Even here on DKos, I see comments about "sons and fathers" who have been killed and maimed.  Almost NO MENTION of women in the military.

Here, in no particular order, are some American heroes who were killed in combat in Iraq:

• hrh's diary :: ::

(expanded from my comment in georgia10's diary)

Army Sgt. Amanda Pinson, age 21, killed in mortar attack, March 15, 2006.

She told a reporter in 2003,  "I thought, `This is what I want to do -- and I'm going to do it, no matter what.' I tell everybody, `It just feels right.'"

"She loved being in the Army and she loved doing her job," Ehlen said. "She felt like her work saved American lives. That's what she did."

Air Force Airman 1st Class Elizabeth Jacobson, age 21, killed by roadside bomb, September 28, 2005.

"She loved what she was doing and she loved to be able to say that people should give her respect because without her and those like her we wouldn't be free. She stood up for her beliefs and made everyone around her be aware of them," said her grandmother, Sondra Millman-Cosimano of Riviera Beach.

Marine Lance Cp. Juana Navarro-Arellano, age 24, killed by small arms fire, April 8, 2006.

"She was the toughest girl I've ever met," said Pfc. Gustavo Navarro Cristales, a bulk fuel specialist with 9th ESB and close friend of Navarro-Arellano. "She demanded to be treated equal."

Her incredible strength and tenacity was something learned from their mother, Navarro-Arellano's brother explained.

"Juana saw our mother raise six kids by herself," Lorenzo said. "That made her tough. She saw the entire struggle."

Marine Lance Cpl. Holly Charette, age 21, killed by roadside bomb, June 23, 2005.  

"She wanted to become a Marine after 9-11," Charlene Wheetman, Charette's aunt, said Saturday in a statement on behalf of the family. "She wanted to do something for her country. She was a very proud Marine."

Army Spc. Carrie French, age 19, killed by roadside bomb, June 15, 2005.

French said his daughter had an adventurous spirit and loved the outdoors. She had plans to travel Europe and study law after her tour of duty in Iraq.

For her high school graduation gift she asked her father to take her skydiving.

"She was willing to try anything, really," Rick French said.

[...]

He said she died doing what she wanted to do.

"I was scared (when she deployed), but I was very, very proud of her," he said. "She's my hero."

Army Spc. Toccara Green, killed by roadside bomb, August 14, 2005.  

Toccara Green's desire to be in the military was evident early: for four years in high school she got up early and stayed late to participate in her campus ROTC.

Family and friends say her devotion to her country is what inspired her.

"The only thing that puts my mind at ease is that she died for what she believed in," said Garry Green Jr., her brother. "She said her ideal situation: go out fighting for our country."

Army Staff Sgt. Tricia L. Jameson, age 34, killed when a roadside bomb blew up her Humvee ambulance on July 14, 2005.  She was a health-care specialist responding to a casualty incident.

A friend of hers said she "wanted to go get her hands on some serious injuries and fix some things."

Marine Cpl. Ramona M. Valdez, age 20, killed by roadside bomb on June 23, 2005.

Ramona, a communications specialist who wanted to become a policewoman, had originally been expected home in May. But she died Thursday in an attack on her convoy in Fallujah.

Fiorela Valdez said the family is bitter about the war it increasingly regards as senseless, and blames President Bush.

"Why doesn't he send his daughters over there? If he had a family member there, he'd end the war right now," Valdez said.

Army Pfc. Sam W. Huff, age 18.  killed by roadside bomb on April 18, 2005.

Eighteen-year-old Pfc. Sam Huff was born with a man's name.

But she was a consummate "girlie-girl," said her father, Robert Huff.

She liked to wear false eyelashes and played flute in her high-school band. Last July, she joined the Army, the first step in a career she hoped would take her to the FBI.

On April 18, Huff, an only child, became the 37th U.S. female to die in combat since 2003.

Yesterday, her parents and comrades gathered in a Fort Lewis chapel to recall Huff's independent spirit and her unfulfilled ambitions.

But what they remembered most was that she loved soldiering, and she was good at it. The memorial became, in part, a testimonial to the growing role women are playing in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Born in Tucson, Ariz., on July 12, 1986, Huff was 16 when she announced her intention to enlist in the Army, go to college to study psychology and become an FBI agent....

"We just stood there, dumbfounded," said Robert Huff, a retired Tucson police detective. His wife, Margaret Williams, served as an air traffic controller in the Marines.

But there wasn't any family talk of women not belonging in the military, he said: "Not in our house, are you kidding?"

[...]

"Beneath that beautiful young lady was a backbone of steel," Sgt. Sam Jones wrote in a letter read aloud during her funeral.

Army Sgt. Jessica M. Housby, age 23, killed by roadside bomb on February 09, 2005.

Lt. Archie Rose of the Illinois National Guard said Housby received an award in 1999 after taking part in a training exercise at Fort McCoy, Wis.

She was chosen as the top cadet out of a group of 187 because of her "hard work, enthusiasm and the responsibility," he said.

Army Sgt. Shawna M. Morrison, age 26, killed in mortar attack September 05, 2004.

It was Shawna Morrison's adventurous spirit that propelled her to seek the new, the different, the stimulating, in life.

"She liked to try things, go new places, try new food," said her brother, Allan Morrison. "She liked to test stuff out."

The family often took fishing trips that Shawna looked forward to, [her father] said, and his daughter never minded threading a worm onto a hook.

"She always had a smile. She had a super personality and was great to be around. She would laugh at anything," he said.

Army Spc. Jessica L. Cawvey, age 21, killed by roadside bomb on October 6, 2004.

She had a 6-year-old daughter named Sierra.  Her uncle said, "She joined the service because she wanted to provide the right future for her daughter."

The Cawveys keep the medals and ribbons their daughter earned during her military career in a special wooden box. Sierra recognizes many of the ribbons, and as she showed them to a visitor, she called them by name: "Good Conduct . . . Purple Heart . . . Bronze Star . . ."

"Why did she get that one?" asked her grandma, pausing.

"Because she died."

Army Pfc. Leslie D. Jackson, age 18, killed by roadside bomb on May 20, 2004.

"The Army is what she wanted. That's why there are no regrets," said her aunt, Pearl Roberts. Jackson exchanged e-mails with school principal Earl M. Pappy about her decision to enter the military and her experiences in Iraq. "The students are very upset because she was respected very, very much," he said.

[...]

She viewed the Army as a way to further her education, Roberts said. Jackson grew up in a close-knit family and "loved to shop and dress up and do her nails."

Army Spc. Isela Rubalcava, age 25, killed by mortar attack, May 8, 2004.

Her cousin said, "She's always been a happy person, always smiling. When she came back from boot camp, she was cheerful and told us about how great it was."

Army Sgt. 1st Class Linda Ann Tarango-Griess, age 33, killed by roadside bomb on July 11, 2004.

Her husband said, "She really loved her military career."

Army Sgt. Tatjana Reed, age 34, killed by roadside bomb July 22, 2004.

"She loved the Army," her mother said.

She had a 10-year-old daughter.

Army Capt. Kimberly N. Hampton, age 27, killed when her Kiowa helicopter was shot down on January 02, 2004.

Her parents said she had wanted to be a pilot since she was a child.  In third grade she wrote a paper about how she always wanted to fly.

While in Iraq, she wrote her mother an email:

"If there is anything I can say to ease your mind ... if anything ever happens to me, you can be certain that I am doing the things I love," she wrote. "... I'm living my dreams for sure, living life on the edge at times and pushing the envelope. ...

"So, worry if you must," she added, "but you can be sure that your only child is living a full, exciting life and is HAPPY!"

Army Pfc. Rachel K. Bosveld, age 19, killed in mortar attack October 26, 2003.

She enlisted in the Army when she graduated in June 2002, following in the footsteps of her father, who served in the Army in Italy from 1967-1969, and Craig, who served in the Army in Alaska.

"She idolized her brother," Marvin Bosveld said, pointing to a photograph of Craig holding a toddler-sized Rachel on a tree branch. "I had some reservation because she was a girl. She asked me not to worry about it. She was as good as anyone."

Her mother said she desperately tried to talk her daughter out of it.

"I would have done anything to have her choose a different career," Mary Bosveld said. "She said, `I know, Mom, but I have to do this. ... I want to keep up the family tradition. Except, Mom, I'm going to be the first girl in our entire family."'

There are many more.  If you want to see their names and how and where they died, go to Coalition Casualties and search on "Female".

I'd like everyone who has some kind of problem with feminism to look long and hard at the faces of these women and consider the fact that they died for YOU and they were doing a man's job.

Another Reason to Hate USA: We're Rude Assholes

From the Boston Globe, via Commondreams: US Soldiers Creating Road Rage in Afghanistan

This piece is written by the editor of the Northeastern (University) Voice, a college newspaper:

Although born and raised in the Boston area, the bad-driving center of America, I've nonetheless been screaming mad in traffic only three times in my life. All three were in Kabul, and all were at the American military.

[]

On my second day with ISAF [NATO's International Security Assistance Force], I found myself staring down a US machine-gun barrel -- my driver had gotten a touch too close to a Humvee. Numerous times after that, we were cut off in traffic by American military convoys, sometimes holding Afghans back with dismissive waves of the hand, more often with weapons. I watched dumbstruck one afternoon as the lead Humvee in a convoy pulled out to block a highway for its followers -- and trained its gun on an approaching ISAF convoy.

One morning at an intersection, a pair of Humvees raced through downtown Kabul with a soldier leaning out the top of one while yelling at Afghan drivers to ``get the [expletive] out of the way." That's when I first yelled -- in spectacularly vulgar terms -- as the soldier gawked and my driver snickered. But bad American driving in Afghanistan isn't funny. Imagine, if you would, Afghans speeding around Boston in military vehicles, bellowing at other drivers and pointing guns at anyone who tries to pass. Then imagine how we'd respond the first time an Afghan vehicle killed a civilian -- and what would happen after the 10th, or the 20th.

An American major said it is impressed on soldiers during training that they're headed to a hostile country where everyone is a potential car bomber and their best defense is aggressive driving. After that chat, a German captain said, with a straight face, that he tells his men: ``Your best weapon is a smile."

That sounded hopelessly silly. But in January, I was rolling down a main road in an ISAF pickup. A US convoy pulled ahead of us, and we watched, amazed, as the vehicles slammed through a heavy puddle and serially soaked an elderly Afghan man on a bicycle. We drew alongside him, slowed down, avoided the water, and waved, and the sodden man brightened up momentarily to grin and wave back. The smile works.

The United States is spending a lot of blood and treasure in Afghanistan, with hopes of remaking the country after decades of war and vicious poverty. We're doing work that's underappreciated here and in the rest of the world. But daily, petty discourtesies -- more than poverty, more than battles, more than bombings -- have built enough resentment over the years to rip Kabul apart. The path to Afghan hearts and minds has a lower speed limit and a few yield signs, and Americans are desperately in need of driver ed.

'Innocents Slaughtered'

Incompetent fools, sending soldiers to kill and die
Our in bed media has never reported the truth of the atrocities against Iraqi civilians until now, when the war is going badly and the casualties have piled up and up and up. War is hideous. Our military leaders with their scrambled egg chests full of medals and ribbons are incompetent, like everyone else appointed or promoted by the Bush Administration. The soldiers are under attack by an enemy they cannot see, whose language they do not understand, a classic guerrilla war. Trained to kill, they strike back indiscriminately. Robert Fisk's editorial from the Independent (reprinted in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) is chilling but I suspect accurate.

Robert Fisk: The way Americans like their war

Could Haditha be just the tip of the mass grave?

The corpses we have glimpsed, the grainy footage of the cadavers and the dead children; could these be just a few of many? Does the handiwork of the United States' army of the slums go further?

I remember clearly the first suspicions I had that murder most foul might be taking place in our name in Iraq. I was in the Baghdad mortuary, counting corpses, when one of the city's senior medical officials, an old friend, told me of his fears. "Everyone brings bodies here," he said. "But when the Americans bring bodies in, we are instructed that under no circumstances are we ever to do post-mortems. We were given to understand that this had already been done. Sometimes we'd get a piece of paper like this one with a body." And here the man handed me a U.S. military document showing with the hand-drawn outline of a man's body and the words "trauma wounds."

[]

We have all heard of Bloody Sunday. The Israelis sat and watched while their proxy Lebanese militia butchered and eviscerated its way through 1,700 Palestinians. And of course the words My Lai are now uttered again. Yes, the Nazis were much worse. And the Japanese. And the Croatian Ustashi. But this is us. This is our army. These young soldiers are our representatives in Iraq. And they have innocent blood on their hands.

I suspect part of the problem is that we never really cared about Iraqis, which is why we refused to count their dead. Once the Iraqis turned upon the army of occupation with their roadside bombs and suicide cars, they became Arab "gooks," the evil sub-humans whom the Americans once identified in Vietnam. Get a president to tell us that we are fighting evil and one day we will wake to find that a child has horns, a baby has cloven feet.

Remind yourself these people are Muslims and they can all become little Mohamed Attas. Killing a roomful of civilians is only a step further from all those promiscuous air strikes that we are told kill 'terrorists" but which all too often turn out to be a wedding party or -- as in Afghanistan -- a mixture of "terrorists" and children or, as we are soon to hear, no doubt, "terrorist children."

[]

For who can be held to account when we regard ourselves as the brightest, the most honorable of creatures, doing endless battle with the killers of Sept. 11 or July 7 because we love our country and our people -- but not other people -- so much. And so we dress ourselves up as Galahads, yes as Crusaders, and we tell those whose countries we invade that we are going to bring them democracy. I can't help wondering today how many of the innocents slaughtered in Haditha took the opportunity to vote in the Iraqi elections -- before their "liberators" murdered them.

Raw Story has photos of the civilians murdered at Ishaqi. Not for the squeamish; so many are children.

The military has already investigated the slaughter at Ishaqi, and pronounced it good:

U.S. commanders used appropriate force in taking down a safe house in Iraq during a March 15 military raid that led to the deaths of as many as a dozen civilians, according to the results of an investigation announced in Baghdad yesterday.

They're Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

Edward Jayne, Dissident Voice: '36 Bush disasters'

Almost everything has gone wrong in the Bush administration. Bush constantly takes the presumably high moral ground while using trickery and misdirection to promote unacceptable policies. He seeks to benefit his "real" base, the wealthiest segment of the U.S. population, while remaining mostly indifferent to less affluent Americans. He harasses his opponents as enemies of the state, while staffing his administration at all levels with political hacks whose only qualification is their undiluted loyalty to his leadership. And he actually takes pride in being a "war president" in direct contact with God, able to obtain God's permission to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Insisting on his conservative agenda, he has become a "radical" president, probably the worst and most incompetent in U.S. history.

John Farmer, Newark (NJ) Star-Journal: 'Bush's band of war-happy simpletons'

And what about the neocons, our home-front heroes -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, the civilians they've recruited like Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Stephen Hadley -- who orchestrated the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war and foreign regime change?

They should never again be allowed anywhere near the instruments and agencies of the American government.

Blogtopia Round-Up, April 12, 2006

Billmon has the must-read post of the day, on crazypants Bush and his nuclear ambitions:

Mutually Assured Dementia

I mean, what exactly does it take to get a rise out of the media industrial complex these days? A nuclear first strike against a major Middle Eastern oil producer doesn't ring the bell? Must every story have a missing white woman in it before the cable news guys will start taking it seriously?

Pharyngula links to a report on Minnesota godbags that refuse to provide services to a disabled senior; she's a transsexual.

Good thing we're moving to faith-based initiatives, huh?

Hallelujah! And this is exactly why I will always oppose any attempt to draft the godly into the business of supporting the social safety net. It is this pretense of knowing the will of an invisible being, which they freely use to give their bigotry the deity's imprimatur, which makes them untrustworthy. Anyone who makes untestable claims of a god's will, claims that can't be verified by anyone else, is suspect—it's simply too convenient an out. And when it's used to make an innocent suffer, it's simply contemptible.

Welshman at dailykos finds an LATimes article that proves: (1) the democracy in Afghanistan is a sham; and (2) Pakistan is betraying our military men and women. Oh, and by the way? The Taliban is back. Seems they never left.

THE STARTLING REVELATIONS THAT THE MEDIA IGNORED


skippy (yes! he invented the term 'blogtopia'!) points out that Richard Mellon Scaife, the rightwing nutjob who funded 'The Arkansas Project' to get Bill Clinton over his sex life, is having some woman problems of his own. I'm filled with pity, myself:

her karma ran over his dogma

Just for Laughs

I received this in an email:

A Lesson In Political Science

DEMOCRAT

You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful.
Barbara Streisand sings for you.

REPUBLICAN

You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?

SOCIALIST

You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.

COMMUNIST

You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.

CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE

You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.

BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE

You have two cows.
Under the new farm program the government pays you to shoot one, milk the other, and then pours the milk down the drain.

AMERICAN CORPORATION

You have two cows.
You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one.
You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when one cow drops dead. You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you have downsized and are reducing expenses.
Your stock goes up.

FRENCH CORPORATION

You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.
You go to lunch and drink wine.
Life is good.

JAPANESE CORPORATION

You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains.
Most are at the top of their class at cow school.

GERMAN CORPORATION

You have two cows.
You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour.
Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.

ITALIAN CORPORATION

You have two cows but you don't know where they are.
While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman.
You break for lunch.
Life is good.

RUSSIAN CORPORATION

You have two cows.
You have some vodka.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You have some more vodka.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.

TALIBAN CORPORATION

You have all the cows in Afghanistan , which are two.
You don't milk them because you cannot touch any creature's private parts.
You get a $40 million grant from the US government to find alternatives to milk production but use the money to buy weapons.

IRAQI CORPORATION

You have two cows.
They go into hiding.
They send radio tapes of their mooing.

POLISH CORPORATION

You have two bulls.
Employees are regularly maimed and killed attempting to milk them.

BELGIAN CORPORATION

You have one cow.
The cow is schizophrenic.
Sometimes the cow thinks he's French, other times he's Flemish.
The Flemish cow won't share with the French cow.
The French cow wants control of the Flemish cow's milk.
The cow asks permission to be cut in half.
The cow dies happy.

FLORIDA CORPORATION

You have a black cow and a brown cow.
Everyone votes for the best looking one.
Some of the people who actually like the brown one best accidentally vote for the black one.
Some people vote for both.
Some people vote for neither.
Some people can't figure out how to vote at all.
Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which one you think is the best-looking cow.

CALIFORNIA CORPORATION

You have millions of cows.
They make real California cheese.
Only five speak English.
Most are illegals.
Arnold likes the ones with the big udders.

UAE Port Security Takeover Update

George Bush has never vetoed a bill in his five disastrous years in office. Yet, despite the fact that this deal stinks to high heaven (the US never conducted the mandatory investigation before approving it), now Bush is ready to veto. Anything for his great and good friends the UAE.

Mr. "We'll get bin Laden, dead or alive" once passed up a chance to get bin Laden. Why? Because Osama was hanging out with his friends the UAE royal family.

This deal stinks. Will Congress have the spine to scuttle the deal?

ThinkProgress: Administration Failed To Conduct Legally Required Investigation Before Approving UAE Port Deal

The law [] makes the 45-day investigation mandatory in cases like the Dubai World Ports transfer.

[]

Yet, the investigation never happened. Bush administration officials “could not say why a 45-day investigation did not occur.”

Eschaton: Jolly Old Pals

From March, 2004:

The Central Intelligence Agency did not target Al Qaeda chief Osama bin laden once as he had the royal family of the United Arab Emirates with him in Afghanistan, the agency's director, George Tenet, told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States on Thursday.

Had the CIA targeted bin Laden, half the royal family would have been wiped out as well, he said.

I don't see how it's a good idea to hand over ports to Bin Laden's pals.

Again, this is not about an "Arab company," this is a company owned and controlled by the hereditary oligarchy of the UAE, many of whom, apparently, were Bin Laden's jolly old pals.

New York lawmakers stunned by Bush's ports veto threat
The six ports include NY and NJ


Previous posts:

So Who Did Review the UAE/Ports Deal?

Terrorist Funders Would Control US Military Equipment Shipments As Well As US Ports

If Terrorist Funders Run Our Ports, Terrorists Win

Privatization Gone Wild - Bushco Puts Terrorist Funders in Charge

This Land Is Your Land

The Bush Administration proposes selling off 300,000 acres of our national forest. Anything to protect those tax cuts for millionaires. From Scrutiny Hooligans, via skippy:

United States Forest Service to Sell 300,000 Acres of Your National Parks Forests

The Bush administration's FY 2007 is a trainwreck for nearly every domestic program in America. While continuing to lower taxes on the wealthiest Americans, Bush plans to increase the defense budget to record heights before even counting the costs of War in Iraq and Afghanistan. This means that, in order to claim fiscal responsibility, Bush wants to decimate domestic programs (Read here for a more comprehensive look).

In the case of the Amendment to Extend the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act, Bush is hiding a selloff of American public lands behind the desperate state of rural education. The plan is to sell about 300,000 acres of National parklands to private interests and then to use that money to fund rural schools for five years. The current SRSCSDA funds rural schools by logging federal land, but the trees just ain't what used to be. So it's time to start logging the public lands, the national parks forests.

[]

As soon as the public comment period begins, it will up to citizens to contest each and every sale. Until the public commment period begins, it is up to citizens to demand their representatives oppose this senseless move. This is part of an ongoing Bush administration effort to privatize public lands, expand logging, and starve the public education system.

We can fund education and preserve our national forests for our grandchildren. It just means that Dick Cheney loses his tax cut.

Bushco Tortures In Our Name

From the Guardian.uk, excerpts from the diary of Benyam Mohammed, who was arrested in Pakistan and flown in a US government plane a prison in Morocco:

'One of them made cuts in my penis. I was in agony'

They took the scalpel to my right chest. It was only a small cut. Maybe an inch. At first I just screamed ... I was just shocked, I wasn't expecting ... Then they cut my left chest. This time I didn't want to scream because I knew it was coming.

One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony. They must have done this 20 to 30 times, in maybe two hours. There was blood all over. "I told you I was going to teach you who's the man," [one] eventually said.

They cut all over my private parts. One of them said it would be better just to cut it off, as I would only breed terrorists. I asked for a doctor.

[]

I suffered the razor treatment about once a month for the remaining time I was in Morocco, even after I'd agreed to confess to whatever they wanted to hear. It became like a routine. They'd come in, tie me up, spend maybe an hour doing it. They never spoke to me. Then they'd tip some kind of liquid on me - the burning was like grasping a hot coal. The cutting, that was one kind of pain. The burning, that was another.

In all the 18 months I was there, I never went outside. I never saw the sun, not even once. I never saw any human being except the guards and my tormentors, unless you count the pictures they showed me.

Who is Benyam Mohammed? Again, The Guardian.uk:


Suspect's tale of travel and torture

Mohammed, 26, who grew up in Notting Hill in west London, is alleged to be a key figure in terrorist plots intended to cause far greater loss of life than the suicide bombers of 7/7. One allegation, which he denies, is of planning to detonate a "dirty bomb" in a US city; another is that he and an accomplice planned to collapse a number of apartment blocks by renting ground-floor flats to seal, fill with gas from cooking appliances, and blow up with timed detonators.

[]

Mohammed was born in Ethiopia and came to the UK aged 15 when his father sought asylum. After obtaining five GCSEs and an engineering diploma at the City of Westminster College in Paddington, he decided to stay in Britain when his father returned, and was given indefinite leave to remain. In his late teens he rediscovered Islam, prayed regularly at al-Manaar mosque in Notting Hill, and was a volunteer at its cultural centre. "He is remembered here as a very nice, quiet person, who never caused any trouble," says Abdulkarim Khalil, its director.

He enjoyed football, and was thought good enough for a semi-professional career. "He was a quiet kid, he seemed deep thinking, although that might have been because his language skills weren't great," says Tyrone Forbes, his trainer.

In June 2001 Mohammed left his bedsit off Golborne Road, Notting Hill, and travelled to Afghanistan, via Pakistan. He maintains he wanted to see whether it was "a good Islamic country or not". It appears likely that he spent time in a paramilitary training camp.

He returned to Pakistan sometime after 9/11, and remained at liberty until April 2002 - during which time, US authorities believe, he became involved in the dirty bomb and gas blast plots. His alleged accomplice, a Chicago-born convert to Islam, Jose Padilla, is detained in the US. Mohammed says interrogators repeatedly demanded he give evidence against him.

You will recall despite the three years of claims about Padilla's involvement with a dirty bomb plot, that when the government finally indicted him a few days ago to avoid a Supreme Court decision about his indefinite detention, the dirty bomb plot was not charged. It was not even mentioned.

....Now that Padilla has actually been indicted, he is not accused of dirty bombs, apartment fires or any violent act whatsoever. Instead, he is accused of playing a decidedly marginal role in a group that allegedly sought to provide support for unidentified terrorist acts abroad. No one in the conspiracy is accused of engaging in any violence, and Padilla's role is so tangential that he is not even actually accused of providing material support to terrorists. Most of the case consists of fraud and perjury charges against the other defendants. The most interesting fact in the indictment is that one of Padilla's aliases was "Abu Abdullah the Puerto Rican."

So Mohammed has been tortured to reveal the existence of a plot that probably never existed. We have lowered ourselves to the level of the lowest, the vilest of the nation states of the world. We are in Saddam Hussein territory here, Duarte, Baby Doc, the torturers.

We have a special counsel looking into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, in part because the release of her identification put other covert agents and cooperating persons at risk of torture.

Isn't the torture scandal worthy of its own special counsel? I'm writing to my senators and my representative today.

Not in my name. No longer.

The Gulag Archipelago

From the front page of today's Washington Post:

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.

Now that we've taken over and are operating the old Soviet Union secret prisons, what could be next for the Bush Administration? Maybe we could re-open Auschwitz to get rid of those pesky guys at Guantanimo. Because freedom is just one more word for nothing left to lose.

Bush makes Nixon look like a piker.

This is American? I am sickened.

Just Say No to Torture

A letter by Capt. Ian Fishback of the 82nd Airborne, to Sen. John McCain, published in yesterday's WaPo:

A Matter of Honor

While I served in the Global War on Terror, the actions and statements of my leadership led me to believe that United States policy did not require application of the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan or Iraq....

....Do we sacrifice our ideals in order to preserve security? Terrorism inspires fear and suppresses ideals like freedom and individual rights. Overcoming the fear posed by terrorist threats is a tremendous test of our courage. Will we confront danger and adversity in order to preserve our ideals, or will our courage and commitment to individual rights wither at the prospect of sacrifice? My response is simple. If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is "America."

Once again, I strongly urge you to do justice to your men and women in uniform. Give them clear standards of conduct that reflect the ideals they risk their lives for.

And Alberto Gonzales is Being Considered for the Next Supreme Court Seat? God Help Us.

Torture is the official policy of the former bastion of freedom, the United States of America.

From Time Magazine:

Pattern of Abuse
A decorated Army officer reveals new allegations of detainee mistreatment in Iraq and Afghanistan. Did the military ignore his charges?

"On their day off people would show up all the time," the sergeant continues in the HRW report. "Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC [stands for Persons Under Control; prisoners] tent. In a way it was sport. The cooks were all U.S. soldiers. One day a sergeant shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy's leg with a mini Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat. He was the cook."

The Human Rights Watch report:

Leadership Failure
Firsthand Accounts of Torture of Iraqi Detainees by the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division

We Must Leave Iraq Now

I made the mistake of going to nowthatsfuckedup.com, the website mentioned in Billmon's article. The pictures posted there, under the caption

"Pictures From Iraq And Afghanistan - Gory
Pictures in this forum are submitted by U.S. Soldiers from over in Iraq and Afghanistan and will probably be a little gory. So if you get sick easy or have a problem with dead terrorists please don't look here.",

by American soldiers, are revolting. I felt sick and immediately clicked off. The pictures are so much worse than the Abu Ghraib pictures that were released. What are we doing there? How does so much carnage change anything?

Heart of Darkness

But something happened on my way to a confession: I came across the Nation article on nowthatsfuckedup.com, which meant I had to take a good, hard look at the psychopathic side of the American spirit, and consider its implications not just for the war on terrorism and the occupation of Iraq, but its role in the emergence of an authentically fascist movement in American politics, one which feeds on violence and the glorification of violence, and which has found an audience not just in the U.S. military (where I think -- or at least hope -- it's still a relatively small fringe) but in the culture as a whole.

I don't have time at the moment to explain fully why and how this peek at the banality of evil changed my thinking, although I'll try to cover it in a future post. Suffice it to say that my visit to nowthatsfuckedup.com was a reminder of the genocidal skeletons hanging in the American closet. It left me with the conviction -- or at least an intuitive suspicion -- that an open-ended war in Iraq (or in the broader Islamic world) will bring nothing but misery and death to them, and creeping (or galloping) authoritarianism to us.

We have to get out -- not because withdrawal will head off civil war in Iraq or keep the country from fallling under Iran's control (it won't) but because the only way we can stop those things from happening is by killing people on a massive scale, probably even more massive than the tragedy we supposedly would be trying to prevent.