NYT editorial: Petraeus wants "surge" to continue another 2 years

NYT Editorial

Yesterday provided two more frustrating and shameful examples of this denial. One was a new war plan drawn up by America's top military commander and top diplomat in Baghdad that will keep American troops fighting in Iraq at least until 2009. The other was yet one more speech by President Bush that claimed that Iraq was the do-or-die front in the war on terrorism -- rather than a rallying point for extremists and a never-ending drain on the resources America needs to fight that fight.

The war plan drawn up by Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker simply assumes that a large-scale United States military presence in Iraq will continue for at least two more years.

So much for Mr. Bush's soothing incantations about a relatively short-term "surge" of additional troops....

Mr. Bush proposed no realistic new plan for more effectively fighting Al Qaeda in its heartland or for exiting from the tragic misadventure in Iraq. Instead he offered the familiar, simplistic and misleading arguments that he used to drag the country into this disastrous war to start.

Prolonging the war for another two years will not bring victory. It will mean more lives lost, more damage to America's international standing and fewer resources to fight the real fight against terrorists. If Mr. Bush's advisers can't tell him that, Congress will have to -- with a veto-proof majority.

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Open thread

You know you're a pack-rat when you find old mail from Pan Am in your drawer. A lot of it. Read More......

Why is Congress still funding Gonzales' salary?

Enough with the hearings. The Senate Dems held yet another hearing to interrogate a guy who lies at hearings. And what a surprise, the habitual liar, who never gets punished for lying, showed no remorse about having lied.

Has no one in Congress ever had children?

In the next 3 months Congress will have to pass the appropriations bill funding Mr. Gonzales' cushy job for another, his final, year. If the Dems in Congress insist on doing nothing serious about this man's crimes, then they deserve what they get.

Fool me fifty times, shame on me. Read More......

GOP Rep. Bachmann compares Baghdad to "Mall of America"

From the Star Tribune:

The congressional delegation met with Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces.

What was the palace like?

"It's absolutely huge," she said. "I turned to my colleagues and said there's a commonality with the Mall of America, in that it's on that proportion. There's marble everywhere. The other thing I remarked about was there is water everywhere. He had man-made lakes all around his personal palace -- one for fishing, one for boating."

Yes, let's compare.

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GOP launches attack on Harry Reid for telling the truth

The Chair of Republican National Committee, Robert M. "Mike" Duncan, just launched a full-scale attack on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The funny thing is that the first line of the e-mail could be a fundraiser for Democrats:

On Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) called President Bush "a liar" and a "part of the culture of corruption."

Both true.

Duncan's e-mail devolves into a rant from there. But you have to love the fact that the RNC is attacking Reid for doing something most Republican will never, ever do: Tell the truth.

Yes, Harry Reid had the audacity to say that George Bush lies. George Bush does lie and most Americans know it. Bush lied about the Iraq war -- and just today lied to all of us about Al Qaeda -- again.

The problem for Mr. Duncan and the RNC is that, as the ABC News/Washington Post poll found, even Republicans are abandoning Bush. The Republicans on Capitol Hill are in big trouble. And, it's getting worse by the day.

Look at the Senate. Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans have followed Bush's lead. They've enabled Bush's lies. And, they're going to pay a big political price. Just today, Chris Cilizza reports that McConnell could be in serious trouble in 2008. Last week, Tony Blankley, an editor of Reverend Moon's paper who is also a mouthpiece of the institutional GOP here in DC, basically wrote off the re-election efforts of Republican Senators Susan Collins and Gordon Smith on the Diane Rehm show. Blankley said both of those Senators are in "desperate straits" and "Bush's policy is terribly unpopular and it's going to reflect on them and they are going to lose their re-election bids." Sounds like the GOP brain trust has already decided those two are history.

So, while the RNC is attacking Harry Reid, the GOP, especially the Senate Republican caucus, is falling apart -- because of George Bush and his lies. No wonder they don't want Harry Reid telling the truth. Read More......

Stop expecting Gonzales to follow the law, he just wants to fight terrorists

Wow. The terrorism excuse really is the last refuge for all the losers in the Bush administration. It would be one thing if they were actually doing something to protect us -- instead of letting Osama Bin Laden reconstitute and still rule the very terror network that attacked America. Instead, the Bushies play the terrorism card when they're in trouble. For them, it's just a political issue:

Mr. Gonzales said he wanted to focus on his department’s “No. 1 priority, keeping our country safe from terrorists, and the urgent need, quite frankly, for more help from Congress in this fight.” Specifically, he said, Congress should update the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to address the vast advances in telecommunications technology in recent years and ease restrictions on gathering intelligence.

So Gonzales got pummeled by the Senators on the Judiciary Committee today -- including Specter, but this paragraph sums up the situation:

Yet for all the hostility vented at Mr. Gonzales, there was no sign that today’s hearing would change anything. President Bush has repeatedly said he stands behind Mr. Gonzales, his old friend from Texas.

And, together, Bush and Gonzales have made the country less safe.

Heckuva job, fellas. Read More......

Even Republicans are abandoning Bush over his failed Iraq policies -- and his stubborn refusal to change the course

No wonder Hill Republicans are freaking out. They must be reading the polls. Even average Republicans are opposing Bush's stubborn refusal to change the course in Iraq. But, those Senate Republicans keep obstructing every effort to find a new policy anyway. Their loyalty to Bush outweighs everything:

President Bush faces growing disenchantment in his own party on the war in Iraq, with most Republicans -- his customarily loyal base -- now saying he's not willing enough to change his war policies. Discontent runs so deep that six in 10 Americans would shift control of the war to Congress.

Overall, an overwhelming 78 percent of Americans in this ABC News/Washington Post poll say Bush is not willing enough to change his stance on the war, up from 66 percent last December. The biggest movement is among Republicans; 55 percent say the president is not willing enough to alter his Iraq polices, up 16 points.

This probably also explains why Bush has started talking -- and lying -- about Al Qaeda again. However, these days when Bush talks about Al Qaeda, he's basically advertising his failed anti-terror policy. Almost six years ago, Bush told us he'd defeat the terror network that attacked the U.S. Now, the real Al Qaeda is reconstituted while Bush -- with help from his GOP allies on Capitol Hill -- has us stuck in the Iraq quagmire. That same quagmire is what made the real Al Qaeda stronger. And, by real Al Qaeda, I mean the Al Qaeda that attacked the U.S., the one that is getting stronger in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's the real Al Qaeda, not the one Bush created in Iraq. His speech today was another desperate, pathetic attempt to spin the war. Read More......

Bush just said that Al Qaeda is "public enemy number one" in Iraq. It's a flat-out lie, and all of his own experts have said it.

FURTHER UPDATE: The latest US intelligence shows that Al Qaeda's leadership is in Pakistan, and it's growing stronger. Osama is in Pakistan. What the hell are we still doing in Iraq while Bush refuses to take out Al Qaeda's leadership in Pakistsan? It is a flat-out insult to our troops, lying to them about why they're being asked to risk their lives.

UPDATE: Now he's claiming that anyone who wants us to withdraw from Iraq is doing so because they don't believe Al Qaeda is even IN Iraq. False. Everyone knows that Al Qaeda is NOW in Iraq, since Bush basically invited them in, but we don't believe - the experts in Bush's own administration don't believe - that Al Qaeda is "the PRINCIPAL threat" in Iraq because it is not. This is a civil war. Second, they don't believe that you are capable of winning this war because you're an arrogant, obstinate, blithering idiot who refuses to change the course. More of our troops are going to die needlessly because their commander in chief is an idiot.

It's a total, flat-out lie. Alex has already explained this in detail.

Anyone who claims that the so-called al Qaeda in Iraq group is the "principal threat" to anything in that nation -- whether its citizens, the government, the political process, or any specific ethnic or sectarian group -- is either grossly ignorant of the realities of the Iraq war or blatantly lying. I honestly have no idea which it is in this case, though it's worth noting that the chief U.S. military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, was employed as a Special Assistant to the President prior to his current appointment.

Most reliable estimates put the fundamentalist/jihadist/al Qaeda actors in Iraq at around 3-5% of the total insurgency, with virtually no approximations exceeding 10%. I really cannot overstate how misleading it is to focus on al Qaeda when the driving forces of the conflict are average, native, very pissed-off -- but not religious fundamentalist -- Iraqis. The vast majority of the Sunni population is relatively secular (more secular, in fact, than Iraqi Shia), and even tacit support of jihadists is founded in anti-American sentiment. Even the sectarian violence is fueled more by localized conflicts between Sunni and Shia families, tribes, and militias than by al Qaeda

It's not debatable, the man is lying, and our own intelligence agencies have told him so. Yet he keeps doing it. He in on his own personal God-anointed Christian crusade against the "evil Muslims." And he wonders why they hate us. Read More......

Cliff's Corner

The Week That Was 7/20/07

Another Week. More preposterousness to report.

What a week it's been for the ranting-rube named O'Reilly. Sadly, he was forced to take a few hours off from falafel-gazing and sizing up Miss New Jersey's potential for an on-air loofahing so he could accuse Yearly Kos attendees of resemblign the "KKK" and "Nazis." Meanwhile, showing their usual level of consistency, FoxNews just added a new robo-contributor who likes to call Barack Obama racist names when not auditioning for a role as a Woody Allen character.

They report, Sean Hannity decides.

And speaking of the mendacious who lack function in their frontal lobe, let's talk about a few GOP Senators, namely Susan Collins and Mitch McConnell. The former, a know-nothing professional liar, who liked to claim term limits until her two terms were cashed and still calls herself a "moderate," while voting for Benito Alito and joining hands with every Iraq-enabling, rubber-stamp, McCain-for-brains in the Senate.

The woman endorsed Sir John of Arizona for President. She was endorsed by Lieberman. She campaigned with Bush. What else do you need to know about her marriage to Sunni-Shiite violence and American soldiers dying in a war based upon lies, besides the fact that when she opens her mouth she actually sounds like she has a couple of spent mortal shells in it.

It's called RIF Suze. Reading Is Fundamental. It's never too late you see.

As for McConnell. Well, what can we say about George W. Bush's best friend? He's been cowering in a closet somewhere on the Capitol grounds lately (Lindsey Graham's suite?), issuing his orders but too scared to provide consistent opinions on immigration and Iraq, lest his corporate bosses crack the whip against his already greased and prone corpus and make him scream "sir may I have another?"

It's gonna be ok Mitch. Just come on out of that closet and share your strong, firm, manly positions on all issues where there may be some corporate benefactor to please, particularly Communist China. You know, the place where you like to ship our jobs in return for food more polluted than Rush Limbaugh's red blood cells.

Surely there must be some more legislation for the common-good you can obstruct in your never-ending quest to collect more cash than a de-pantsed hooker on David Vitter's lawn?

Remember folks. These two clowns are up for reelection next year. It's time to show them that jokers, are in fact, not wild. Read More......

No more anonymity. Our "AJ in DC" comes out.

For over a year, I’ve written on AMERICAblog as "AJ in DC." My AMERICAblog bio gave some indication of my background, but I’ve maintained my anonymity fairly carefully for a variety of reasons. I recently decided this protection is no longer necessary.

So today it’s my pleasure to lose the cloak (if not the dagger): I’m A.J. Rossmiller.

Professionally I often go by Alex, but I’m among friends here, so A.J. it is. Last spring, I left the Defense Intelligence Agency (essentially the spy arm of the Department of Defense) where I was an Intelligence Officer for the Iraq office. I joined DIA wanting to contribute to the defense and security of my country, and I left convinced that the system -- and especially the Iraq office -- was politicized and manipulated to such a degree that we were doing more harm than good. When I resigned, I wanted to put to use my experience both in the field in Iraq and at the Pentagon to help advance reality-based security and foreign policies, and John was kind enough to offer me a place here to do just that.

In my establishment life, I’m a Fellow at the National Security Network, a fantastic organization run by Rand Beers, a former Marine and 35 year veteran of the civil service who resigned from the National Security Council just days before we invaded Iraq. I’ve kept a foot firmly in the blogger/activist world, of course, and some of you may have seen me on the foreign policy panel at YearlyKos last year -- where I made this opening statement, not revealing that I wrote for this site. More in the establishment vein, I’ve also done freelance pieces now and then.

I should also note that I’ve written a book –- a first-hand account of Iraq and the intelligence process (during the war, not before it) –- which will be published by Random House and is currently in the editing process. More on that in the coming months.

I have tremendous faith in (and affection for) public discourse, and I believe in the intelligence and goodness of people when they have the ability to see and evaluate the facts. It is in this spirit that I continue to study, discuss, and write about these issues, and I hope to continue as part of the AMERICAblog community for years to come. As always, I can be reached at AJamericablog (at) gmail.com, and I greatly appreciate your readership and support.

cheers,
A.J. Rossmiller Read More......

Blogging from the Capitol as the Minimum Wage increase takes effect

Today, the new minimum wage takes effect. It's the first increase since September of 1997. I'm at the United States Capitol. Democratic Members of Congress are touting this accomplishment, which came in the face of fierce GOP resistance. I'll update this post throughout the day.

Talked first to Rep. George Miller (D-CA) who is the chair of House Committe on Education and Labor -- and the main sponsor of the new law. He told me that "it's the most important day in ten years in the low-wage earners lives." The hourly rate increases 70 cents an hour, which might not sound like much -- but it adds up for food, rent and other essential expenses.

Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) also stopped by. He's making a name for himself on the House Judiciary Committee where he's been very forceful with witnesses involved in the U.S. Attorneys scandal. Rep. Cohen thinks it is "very symbolic that it's the first accomplishment" of the Democratic Congress. It wasn't planned that way, but this is one of the first progressive pieces of legislation that Bush allowed to become law.

Also, just had the chance to speak with Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA). The man is brilliant. Just brilliant. He knows the economic arguments and how to rebut the right wing talking points. Rep. Frank says that we will see that raising the minimum wage does not cause job loss, which has been a main argument of conservatives. But, that's a "conservative myth" in Frank's view. He also wishes that the increase could have been greater, but that it does help low wage earners "stay afloat." Rep. Frank chairs the House Financial Services Committee and is now working to expand supply of affordable housing. Seriously, the guy is a force majeure...a very, very smart force.

UPDATE:

Had a couple more interesting conversations. Rahm Emanuel stopped by. He talked about the focus it took to get this law enacted. He also noted that today's New York Times has an article about a huge corporate tax break -- pushed by Bush and the GOP Congress -- that produced no jobs:

Two years ago, when companies received a big tax break to bring home their offshore profits, the president and Congress justified it as a one-time tax amnesty that would create American jobs.

Drug makers were the biggest beneficiaries of the amnesty program, repatriating about $100 billion in foreign profits and paying only minimal taxes. But the companies did not create many jobs in return. Instead, since 2005 the American drug industry has laid off tens of thousands of workers in this country.

That's the GOP approach to the economy. Meanwhile, Democrats had to fight for ten years -- and regain control of Congress -- to get a minimum wage increase. Read More......

Host of Bush's anti-health care event doesn't even agree with Bush. Yet, no one asked him last week at the event -- including Bush.

More evidence that the White House press corps are mere stenographers of Bush's words. Last week, your President did a "roundtable" on health care. Basically, the Bush team created an event for Bush to blast the idea of providing health care coverage to children. I wrote a post about that news titled "Bush to America's kids: Screw you."

Turns out Bush's host for the event, Clifton Broumand, doesn't share Bush's disdain for providing insurance to children. Funny how it took us a week to find that out. Didn't anyone ask him -- or was that against the rules. Seems like none of the White House press corps wanted to step on Bush's anti-kids message:

For Broumand, a Democrat who did not vote for Bush, expanding the insurance program for children is a no-brainer. More than 8 million children lack health insurance, according to the Census Bureau. Without coverage, Broumand said, they are less likely to get preventive care and more likely to need expensive emergency room visits, with the costs absorbed by consumers.

"My personal feeling is that the plan should be to cover every child, whether it's private or federal," he said. "When you don't cover children, what ends up happening is that when kids are sick, which happens in my office, parents aren't productive. They have to go home."

Broumand said he is not in favor of a government-run health system. But he is no fan of insurance companies either. The plan he offers to his 28 employees costs $300 a month for individuals and $800 for family coverage. The business pays $5,600 a month for health insurance -- more than it spends on rent -- and premiums have increased 73 percent since 2003, he said.

Private insurers "are like the Godfather -- they make you an offer you can't refuse," Broumand said. "When my insurance goes up 73 percent in four years, that's a tax. . . . All these things are hidden taxes."

Since 45 million Americans lack insurance, there already is "de facto" rationing, he argued.

It shouldn't have taken a week for us to learn this. Nice report from the Washington Post's Christopher Lee.

There is a huge problem with health insurance in America. Everyone seems to know it except Bush and some of his GOP allies. It's a disaster.

And, note to Hillary Clinton: we know you bear "the scars" from the 1993 health care fiasco. But, those are figurative scars. A lot of Americans bear really serious injuries and diseases because of the health care fiasco in this country. Read More......

Tuesday Morning Open Thread

It's going to be a busy day. The minimum wage increase takes effect today -- the first national increase since 1997. I'm heading over to the Capitol this morning for some events surrounding this achievement.

There's lots of other news....what are you hearing? Read More......

Europe's greenest city

Where else? Sweden, of course.

More than 10 years ago, when oil prices were hovering around $20 a barrel, Växjö announced its aim of becoming a Fossil Fuel Free City. Later it set a date for that goal - 2050, and then added intermediary steps, such as halving the carbon emission per inhabitant by 2010. Already Växjö is well on course. It has clocked up a 25 per cent reduction in per-capita emissions, and at 3.5 tonnes of carbon per person, it has the lowest urban level in Europe. It is certainly below the Swedish average of five tonnes and minuscule compared with the United States, where emissions are more than 20 tonnes per person.

There will surely not be a one-size-fits-all solution, but this Swedish town really provides an excellent example for others to think creatively and locally about a global issue. Read More......

Law Council of Australia: Hicks, Haneef treatment politically motivated

This is why Bush's close friend John Howard needs to be sent packing. It should come as no surprise that Rupert Murdoch overwhelmingly dominates the Australian media when there are willing and able helpers like Howard to fuel the undemocratic, knuckle-dragging media. Much like Bush in the US, Howard is Murdoch media and Murdoch media is Howard. Xenophobia? Yes, a key plank for Howard. Bizarre racist attacks for political posturing? Of course. Strong support of Iraq despite evidence that it is a miserable failure? Naturally. The trend has not been overlooked by the Law Council of Australia. First on the Gitmo detainee, David Hicks:

Presenting a damning report on Hicks' trial, the council said the two cases defied legal norms.

"There's an 'Alice in Wonderland' quality to both these cases. First the sentence, then the verdict. Mr Hicks and Mr Haneef both know what that feels like," said council President Tim Bugg

And more recently on the detained Indian doctor in Australia, despite reports that his ties to the failed Scottish attacks are highly suspect.

Haneef, an Indian Muslim doctor, is technically on bail awaiting trial on a charge of providing "reckless" support to a terrorist organisation by giving a SIM card to members of a group linked to the British car bomb attacks.

A decision earlier this month by a Brisbane court to free him on bail was immediately followed by the cancellation of his visa by the government and he remains in custody.

Just think how exciting it will be as the Murdoch media empire in America trips over itself to prop up more politics like this. Fun days ahead... Read More......