Ein GOP

Tom Daschle's opponent has been studying the George Bush school of diplomacy. Brand anyone troubled by 1,000 dead Americans a traitor.

But he said U.S. troops were disturbed by Daschle's criticisms of the Bush administration's Iraq policies shortly before the 2003 invasion. "What it does is emboldens our enemies and undermines the morale of our troops," Thune said.

Interrupted by Russert, who called the statement "a very serious charge," Thune repeated, "His words embolden the enemy."

Daschle called the remarks "very disappointing." "It's not only an attack on me," he said, "it's an attack on where I'm from. I got my values from my mother and dad" in South Dakota.

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GOP congressman starts forest fire, uses influence to get issue squashed

From the Wash Post:

When two-term Rep. Henry E. Brown Jr. (R-S.C.) burned brush on his Cordesville tree farm March 5, gusts of wind blew the fire onto the adjacent Francis Marion National Forest, causing at least $4,000 in damage to 20 acres.

On Sept. 8 came some unexpected fallout.

In a detailed 'whistle-blower' complaint sent to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's inspector general, two law enforcement officials with the department's Forest Service charged that Brown used his influence with top USDA and Forest Service officials to get a $250 fine for the incident quashed.

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Bush, Kerry Tentatively Settle on 3 Debates

Sounds to me like Bush caved. No word yet on whether they agreed to Bush's ridiculous request that Homeland Security be part of the "domestic" debate (so Bush can talk about the war on terror through the entire thing). Read the rest of this post...

POLLS NEVER LIE: Bush wins popular vote in 2000 election

Yes, only 2 of 26 polls showed Gore ahead in the 3 days preceding the 2000 election. Two friggin polls. The other 24 showed Bush wining the popular vote. Do you remember how despondent we all were before the election? The polls made it CLEAR that Gore had lost. And what really happened? Gore won the popular vote, even though the day before the election some polls had him 5 points behind, and two days before the election one poll had Gore behind by 9 points! Lesson learned. Now go help Kerry beat this SOB. (The pink boxes below show which candidate is ahead per that specific poll. The election was held on Nov. 7 that year.)

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Wow! Great new Spanish-language anti-Bush ad

This thing rocks. Even if you don't speak Spanish, the music is great! Makes you want to dance, and hit something, at the time :-) Read the rest of this post...

Police dismiss charges against woman who interrupted first lady

Like they had any choice. Read the rest of this post...

Blogger issues...

The americablog.org address was messing up, giving lots of errors, so I did a few tweaks that will take a few hours to straighten themselves out. In the meantime, you can still access this site via http://americablog.blogspot.com/ Read the rest of this post...

"My son voted for Bush.... Now my son is dead"

Click here and copy this ENTIRE STORY, then email it to EVERYONE you know. I'm not kidding. This heart-felt plea from a mom who lost her son is one of the most touching and heart-wrenching things I've read in a long time. This has the potential for one hell of a viral email campaign. Send this to everyone you know and urge them with a quick note to forward it to their friends. It's that good.

Here are some excerpts, but do read the entire thing:

"For whom did my son die in Iraq?"
September 18, 2004
By Diane Davis Santoriello

For the last year and a half, the pain in my gut screamed at my head write about this war, speak out against the war! But my aching heart said, "You can't undermine your son's confidence in what he is doing." Memories of people scorning and smearing Vietnam vets ran rampant through my mind. You see, my son, 1st Lt. Neil Anthony Santoriello Jr., was living his dream....

Now my son is dead. How did he die? According to the Army, he was killed on Aug. 13 in western Iraq when an IED -- an "improvised explosive device" -- detonated near his vehicle. According to me, he was killed by the arrogance and ineptitude of George W. Bush aided by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld....

My father taught me that when you make a mistake the first thing you do is own up to it and the second thing you do is fix it. Bush made mistakes. Did he own up to them right away? No, he waited until recently and admitted to miscalculations....

What Bush needed to do a year or more ago was to go to the United Nations with his hat in his hand and say, "We made a mistake. We thought we were doing the right thing, but now we have a mess that we can't handle. But now we are mired in a country that must be made stable; we don't have the right kind of troops on the ground to do the job right. You folks have the people and the Iraqi people will trust you. Will you help us fix this mistake?"....

This presidential administration ignored experts who told them that they could win the war, but winning the peace presented the challenge. Did they prepare for that? Of course not -- they were too arrogant to change their direction even as the insurgency increased.

Did our men and women in harm's way have what they needed? No.

Did we have enough tanks on the ground? No.

Could we supply parts as they were needed? No.

This Bush team could be on a poster for the old axiom: People don't plan to fail -- they fail to plan.

Their actions tarnished the reputation and honor of the United States. We are supposed to be better than other countries because we believe in individual rights....

My son voted for Bush. If he were alive, would he be voting for him again? I am not sure....

I did not speak out against the war earlier and for this I am angry with myself. My son, a man of incredible honor, died from the actions of dishonorable men. I cannot bring him back. But I speak out now to protect the people still serving, to try to restore honor to our country....

John Kerry was not my first choice for president, but I believe he has demonstrated a willingness to be open-minded. He knows that changing your position is not a character flaw, but a character plus. I believe he is the only person capable of getting the rest of the world to help us clean up the mess created by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the administration's other Iraq hawks.

(Kudos to Buzzflash for finding this item.) Read the rest of this post...

Excellent, excellent, excellent Wash Post article comparing Dem and Repub election strategies

A truly excellent analysis from NBC's political director. Read this, then make your friends read this, then get mad, then do something about it.

When it comes to running national campaigns these days, Democrats and Republicans are wired differently. The two parties have developed starkly different cultures and habits that are on vivid display now in the presidential race and may prove decisive come November.

Republicans today run their political operations by a clear chain of command. The current crowd of Democrats run theirs by committee. Republicans try to stay out of the press and feign indifference about what gets written about their skills. Democrats provide the press with an ongoing background narration of their campaigns, and tend to treat national reporters as therapists. The people running President Bush's reelection campaign operate on the theory that you're either being scored on or doing the scoring. The people at the top of Sen. John Kerry's campaign seemed to believe -- at least until their candidate's slide in the polls after the GOP convention -- that if they got their man a lead, he could win by running out the clock.

Much of the current Democratic campaign culture -- the group-run approach, giving the press an "inside" look at the process -- can be traced back to Bill Clinton's winning effort in 1992. At the same time, Clinton also had his attack-dog "war room," run by James Carville and crew, which inspired the eponymous campaign documentary. But with Al Gore's campaign in 2000, and now the Kerry campaign in 2004, the scrappy war room has given way to a bureaucratic cult of personalities....

The events of the past few weeks, combined with Bush's recent rise in the polls, have revived a longtime Democratic phobia that was briefly suppressed during Bill Clinton's back-to-back campaigns: Could it be that they are not hard-nosed enough -- some would say mean enough -- for today's politics? National Journal independent political analyst Charles Cook phrased it this way: "I think there is a naïve view among Democrats that what you have to do is 'demonstrate a vision and tell the truth' and you win. Republicans know that you need to tear your opponent's heart out, chew it up and spit it out."

As someone who is covering both campaigns intensively, let me state for the record that Democrats and Republicans are on a par when it comes to good manners, personal hygiene and kindness to people who need help crossing the street. But after observing presidential politics for more than a decade, I have concluded that today's crop of Democrats are right to worry that they lack the laser focus and ruthless efficiency of the current GOP -- or even the Clinton campaign.

Since the days of the Clinton war room, the Democrats have treated presidential campaigns as clubs in which an increasing number of advisers "pitch in." In contrast, the more hierarchical Bush campaign has added only one senior aide during the general election fight thus far: Karen Hughes, in a long-planned move. Kerry, in his latest round of hirings, has layered his upper ranks with longtime political professionals from the Clinton era, the party's last winning team. Those advisers turn to other former Clinton aides for informal help. Carville, the strategist taking the highest-profile role, isn't even on the payroll. Longtime Kerry loyalists are an ever-decreasing fraction of the nominee's team.

The Clinton alumni join a senior staff that includes two pollsters and two ad makers -- prompting jokes about a "Noah's Ark" of consultants. A series of press briefings given by the Kerry campaign's senior staff in New York during the Republican convention left many journalists with the impression that there was no single person in charge, no one with ultimate decision-making authority. Such a top-heavy structure can cause delays in decision-making, with only "lowest common denominator" choices being made without internal debate.....

Republicans today understand that presidential races are about character and personality, whereas the Democrats' instinct is to try to beat their opponent into submission with sheaves of policy papers. (If that doesn't work, they tear each other down in the press instead.) ....

One veteran Democratic strategist described the contrast between the two parties this way: In launching and countering attacks, Republicans know that "it often takes the truth a while to catch up, whereas Democrats believe that if something clearly is not true, some imaginary referee will come down and blow a whistle." ....

The Bush campaign doesn't go into a defensive crouch. When attacked, it does a quick two-step, moving quickly from defense to offense so the coverage of their reaction includes an immediate and even preemptive strike against the credibility of the source -- be it "60 Minutes" or the new Kitty Kelley book on the Bush family that began to make the pre-publication publicity rounds last week....

But at the same time, that first weekend of the fall campaign really revealed the current Democratic approach to campaigns at its worst. The culture of blame and territoriality, and a lack of personal investment in the candidate, led Kerry campaigners to engage in a lot of finger-pointing while talking with political reporters about Kerry's drop in the polls. Not that the two surveys showing Bush with a double-digit lead weren't a legitimately rude shock for Democrats, after the race was tied or leaning Kerry's way for months. But the Bush crowd, if they were in a similar position, would run to Karl Rove, not to the media. After counseling them to calm down, Rove would have reminded them that the election is a contest of weeks and months, not days.

A Bush campaign official suggests that the Kerry team's tendency to focus more on each news cycle rather than on the long haul could explain Democrats' uneven efforts to manage expectations -- including their own. Many Democratic officials, inside the Kerry campaign and out, appear to need reminding that their guy hasn't lost yet -- and, indeed, can win....

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A trip down memory lane...

How can we forget George Bush's first lie to the American people as president of this great nation. Brings a tear to my eye. Read the rest of this post...

Republican Senator: "We're in deep trouble in Iraq"

The Republican rats are flleeing the ship, and fast. According to Reuters, lots of them criticized Bush today about Iraq. I suspect they sense he's vulnerable on this issue as the election approaches, and they're NOT seeing the response they want to see from the White House on this issue, so they're going public with their criticism. Such public disunity in the ranks is commonplace for the Dems, but not the Republicans. This is very interesting. Read the rest of this post...

Feel free to borrow these

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Rummy caught lying about Iraq (surprise)

November 2003: Rummy says we have 118,000 Iraqi security personnel
"In the period ahead, we will be accelerating the training of Iraqi forces, with the objective of going from the level today, which is 118,000 Iraqis in the Army, police, site protection, civil defense and border patrols, 118,000 Iraqis under arms, to somewhere in excess of 220,000 sometime during the year 2004." - Rumsfeld, 11/10/03

December 2003: We now have 140,000
"The number of Iraqis in uniform is said to be about 140,000" - Wash Times, 12/8/03

August 2004: Rummy says we now have 220,000 Iraqis in uniform, but only 110,000 functioning
"We’ve gone from zero to something like 220,000 Iraqi security forces of which 110,000 are properly trained and equipped and functioning." - Rumsfeld, DOD Web site, 8/26/04

September 2004: Rummy says we have only 95,000 Iraqis trained and functioning
"[Rumsfeld] said the coalition has fully trained and equipped 95,000 Iraqis in the army, National Guard, Border Patrol and police." - DOD, 9/10/04

September 2004: Biden disects the mess
"The Secretary of Defense said in February we have trained 220,000 Iraqi military - what did he say? - 'an amazing accomplishment'. And that was malarky. Then he said last Friday, a week ago Friday, we've trained 95,000. We had a witness before us from the State Department on Thursday at Dick's hearings, I asked them, I said: 'To the best of my knowledge, Rumsfeld is saying 32,000 cops have been trained, to the best of my knowledge not one single Iraqi policeman has gone through the full compliment of training, is that true?' And the administration witness said 'yes, that's true.'" Read the rest of this post...

Senator Lugar (R-IN): Bush Administration is Incompetent on Iraq

On ABC's THIS WEEK today:

SENATOR LUGAR: $18 billion was appropriated a year ago and only one billion has been spent.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Why isn't that happening?

SENATOR LUGAR: Well, this is incompetence in the administration.

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New Iraqi PM is a big American puppet

Just watched this guy on THIS WEEK. Very sad. He comes off like a big American puppet. Creepy too. Total liar, denies everything. Iraq is a-okay, he says. No problem there at all. Yep, nothing to lose your head over.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Since you've taken office, the insurgents have grown in strength, they're controlling more territory, they're killing more Americans and killing more Iraqis, are they willing this war right now?

IRAQI PRIME MINISTER: I don't think so. I think you're information is wrong.

STEPHANOPOULOS: It's wrong? They're not growing in strength right now?

IRAQI PRIME MINISTER: No.

STEPHANOPOULOS: All the reports are that they're controlling three dozen towns...

IRAQI PRIME MINISTER: I think you really should reconsider the information that you are getting.... The tensions are much less now.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Forgive me sir, but you keep saying the tensions are less. You've been reading headlines all week, 300 Iraqis dead, an attack every single day, it seems to be getting worse not better

IRAQI PRIME MINISTER: No, you are looking at the negative sides only, there are a lot of positive things.

Yes, like Iraqis can now use eBay. Read the rest of this post...

Speaker of the House: Al Qaeda will attack to help Kerry

Ok, the speaker of the House says this right before doing a Cheney fundraiser. Cheney says basically the same thing the week before, and this is said a day or two after the Deputy Secretary of State syas the SAME thing. These SOBSs have actually made this an official talking point of this administration and this campaign. The truly disgusting part of all of this is that they've now politicized terror warnings. That means we can't trust anything they say about upcoming attacks. This is a rather big story.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert said Saturday that he believes Al Qaeda operatives will use terrorism to try to influence the Nov. 2 election to sway opinion toward Democrat John Kerry over President Bush.

"I don't have data or intelligence to tell me one thing or another, [but] I would think they would be more apt to go [for] somebody who would file a lawsuit with the World Court or something rather than respond with troops," said Hastert, a Republican from Plano.

Asked directly by reporters whether he believed Al Qaeda could operate better with Kerry in the White House, Hastert replied, "That's my opinion, yes."

Hastert's remarks came just before he played host to a $150-a-plate fundraising event that featured Vice President Dick Cheney and was attended by more than 2,500 Republican supporters at Northern Illinois University.

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Ducking debates - what a coward!

JOHN'S UPDATE: Kerry ought to announce immediately that we're having the second debate in that town on that night whether Bush is there or not. He should rent out a hall, get 2 podiums (screw Nader), and be there at the appropriate hour. And if Bush isn't there, Kerry can debate an empty podium and invite all the media.

"Experts" now expect bush to duck the second debate -- the one where actual, undecided voters and real people get to ask the president questions.

My understanding is the WH is concerned that one of the "undecideds" really won't be undecided and will ask a very difficult question. But would it suprise anyone if we learned that the bush campaign already asks people to call themselves "undecideds" and call in to tv and radio talk shows? Please. Getting your people to pose as neutral, and then talking up the prez is GOP standard operating procedure. They know it works, so they don't want it to happen to them.

But what about the real undecided Americans who actually have questions? Shouldn't they have the right to ask their "leader" in person, just this one time? Shouldn't the man who's asking for their vote actually, directly ask for it -- and answer a question or two?

Bottom line, bush is a coward. The last tough question he faced was in April. If he gets his way, he won't answer another ever.

One other thought -- please please please don't underestimate this guy. He's a good debater. Lowering expectations is also standard operating procedure. The GOP's goal is to spin "mediocre" into "blowing away all expectations."
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US preparing for offensive against Falluja in November but has nothing to do with "secret plan"

Strange coincidence with this story considering the big story and then bigger denial by the Bushies about the "secret plan" to drag in more National Guard troops to Iraq. Even though the story fails to mention once the "secret plan" this looks like the plan that Kerry and others have been discussing that Bush is not being honest about.

Even after the defeat of the Iraqi troops in Falluja (you remember, where the US trained, paid and armed the Iraqis who then flipped sides and fought and killed US troops with US arms) they're talking again about using them in action. Despite bombing and killing civilians I don't think that the US military is stupid enough to try and use the Iraqi troops in a key offensive. Who do you think they're going to use? (Answer: National Guard and US Reserves.)

Falluja is big but we're now looking at a country-wide problem that will not be fixed by a minor effort. Despite previous complaints about politicians interfering with military matters in Vietnam (you know the story, we lost because of politicians who had no right involving themselves in military matters) political decisions by the White House have clearly had a negative impact on the military situation in Iraq as told by the US military.

Since we live in a democracy, I don't have a problem with the politicians making decisions. I do have a problem with hypocrits like Bush pointing the finger at others for a war we lost in Vietnam while he sat in an officers club in Texas and Alabama. Even now he always tells us that if he is allowing the military to call the shots in Iraq but that is not the case. He's a liar.

Faced with a growing insurgency and a January deadline for national elections, American commanders in Iraq say they are preparing operations to open up rebel-held areas, especially Falluja, the restive city west of Baghdad now under control of insurgents and Islamist groups.

A senior American commander said the military intended to take back Falluja and other rebel areas by year's end. [Interesting coincidence with the timing re: secret plan]

An initial assault by American marines on Falluja was halted in April as Iraqi anger grew at the death of as many as 600 Iraqis in the fighting.

At the time, Marine commanders said that they were perhaps two days away from gaining control of the interior of the city, and that they were ordered to halt by the political leadership in Washington.

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Bush still "pleased with the progress" in Iraq

Now is he pleased that his pathetic ass isn't over there or is he pleased that nobody is paying attention to the disaster playing out in Iraq? In his phone interview with The Union Leader of Manchester, New Hampshire Bush said:

La, la, la, la, mmmm, mmmmm, la, la, la....I'm not listening...I can't hear you...la, la, la...democracy...la, la, la...freedom...la, la, la...

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That's certainly one way of putting it

"Never in the history of the United Nations have we faced so many opportunities to create a safer world by building a better world." - President Bush's radio address, 9/18/04

Another way of putting it is, never before in the history of the United Nations has the US so fucked up so many places around the world that ANYTHING would be considered an improvement in US policy. So in a way the president is right, we've never had so many opportunities to improve US policy and better help the world and ourselves. Read the rest of this post...

Louisiana Voters Approve Gay-Marriage Ban

Not feeling so sorry for them anymore. Read the rest of this post...