Loyalty without truth
is a trail to tyranny.
|
a middle-aged George Washington
|
|
Thursday, 1 December 2005 at 2h 54m 18s | Paul Waldman is cool | Paul Waldman writes a regular blog at the online blog-a-zine
gadflyer.
President Bush gave the umpteenth version of his Iraq speech today, and as
always we were told that this speech would really turn things around because
Bush would define the issue and explain to people why
IraqiscentraltothewaronterrorandtheterroristsareontherunandastheIraqisstandupwew
ill standdownandwewillnotcutandrunandvictoryisaroundthecornerblahblahblah.
In fact, the speech included no fewer than fifteen repetitions of the
word "victory." So this is my question:
Just what, exactly, is "victory" in Iraq?
After all, we won't have the insurgents signing an armistice. There are no
generals to surrender. Zarqawi could be captured tomorrow and the insurgency
would continue unabated. So how will we know when we've won? Bush keeps telling
us that in order to honor the sacrifices of the brave men and women who have
died there, we have to keep our soldiers there to keep dying, to finish the
job, to achieve that glorious victory. So what is this victory supposed to
consist of? And just as important, is there a single person in the
administration who has a clue what the answer to that question is?
Copyright © Paul Waldman.
| Thursday, 1 December 2005 at 0h 59m 59s | Winning the hearts and minds | Thanks to Atrios on the scoop.
This is
from
the LA
Times. [ SOURCE ]
WASHINGTON -- As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is
secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops
in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq.
The articles, written by U.S. military "information operations" troops, are
translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a
defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained
by the Los Angeles Times.
Many of the articles are presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news accounts
written and reported by independent journalists. . The stories trumpet the work
of U.S. and Iraqi troops, denounce insurgents, and tout U.S.-led efforts to
rebuild the country.
While the articles are basically truthful, they present only one side of events
and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi
governments, officials said. Records and interviews indicate that the U.S. has
paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such articles -- with headlines such
as "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism" -- since the effort began this
year.
...
The military's effort to disseminate propaganda in the Iraqi media is taking
place even as U.S. officials are pledging to promote democratic principles,
political transparency and freedom of speech in a country emerging from decades
of dictatorship and corruption.
...
The storyboards, several of which were obtained by The Times, read more like
press releases than news stories. They often contain anonymous quotes from U.S.
military officials; it is unclear whether the quotes are authentic.
"Absolute truth was not an essential element of these stories," said the senior
military official who spent this year in Iraq.
Surprise, surprise. This is what corporate news does here too. In fact,if it
is on the front page, chances are that you are either reading something
sensationalistically inconsequential or you are reading some "political-
analyst" spinning the real news.
For instance, ex-San Diego Congressperson Randall Duke Cunningham has just been
indited for
..receiving $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors and evading more
than $1 million in taxes.
Bribery charges involving a sitting member of Congress are relatively rare.
The money involved makes Cunningham's the largest such case since several
members of Congress were convicted of bribery in the early 1980s.
( -- Tony Perry, Los
Angeles Times --SOURCE)
Makes you think this was front page news. Nope, the Chronicle put this story
from the LA Times on page A-5. What was on the front page? Black hoodlums
breaking into one
Oakland liquor store, new attacks by insurgents in Iraq, and the new fishing
season in the bay area. Cunningham got a close-up pic with just his hand over
his
face no background, but the story was on A-5. Adjacent to Cunningham was a
picture of bad ole
Saddam yelling at the court that is trying him in Iraq -- you get it, don't
you, the bad guys are going to court. But the Iraqi court has been
largely appointed by and orchestrated behind the scenes by U.S. Officials.
And today :
FRONT PAGE STORIES
A quiet move in House to split the 9th Circuit
Uh,oh -- politics in the court-room
Black Muslims arrested in store attacks
2 suspects surrender -- Oakland police urge 4 others to turn themselves in
Citizens alert, the bad guys are close to getting caught
Fighting over the soul of Oakland waterfront
Vast housing plan raises issues of affordability, access
The soul of what? Oh, do you mean that soul-ful Shopping Mall at Jack
London Square?
Governor taps ex-Davis aide as chief of staff
First move in a shakeup
See, the governor can get his act together after all. Returning
from China so he can look gubernatorial, the boss is out kicking butt. OOOOO-
weeee. He looked so cute smiling on the front page with his anorexic wife last
week.
Stem cell program wins key court ruling, poised to issue grants
Hey, hey, money is in the pipeline.
And todays paper breathes not one more word. Will there be a follow up story?
Mind you that
According to documents filed in federal court, Cunningham began receiving
bribes in 2000 as his seniority gave him political power to influence the
awarding of defense contracts.
--[ SOURCE ]
Remember when Secretary of State Kevin Shelley was on the front page of the San
Francisco Chronicle for nearly 2 straight months over a "scandal" in which a
few $10,000 contribution checks came from owners of properties that were
probably illegally benefiting from tax breaks. Rumor was the "deal" was quid
pro quo. Shelley eventually resigned, but he was oddly never indited. The
auditing board found minor discrepancies but nothing for which Shelley could be
prosecuted.
By the way, it is the Secretary of State who has power over the contracts of
voting machines and who is the final authority on all issues relating to
voting. Shelley cancelled Diebold contracts after the 2003 recall farce when
Diebold refused to answer legitimate questions over numerous "irregularities"
and refused to allow the software to be inspected.
Shelley was also going around giving talks to various groups about banning the
use of the machines. Go here
That's why Shelley was taken out, so they can put those corrupt machines in.
That's why Shelley was a front-page reminder for damn near 2 months.
But Randall Cunningham,a sitting Congressional representative of San Diego
indited for consistent bribery that aggregated into the millions gets
one little bitty day on page 5.
|
Why wasn't this pic on the front page?
|
This happens all the time, week after week.
Can. It. Be. Any. More. Obvious.
Someone tell me the San Francisco
Chronicle is not a front for the spin machine of the financial giants because
I'm having a very difficult time believing otherwise.
| Wednesday, 30 November 2005 at 4h 52m 4s | An honorable soldier |
I cannot support a mission that leads to corruption, human rights abuse, and
liars.
I am sullied.
I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored.
From a suicide note left by Colonel van Heusen after he shot himself at the
Iraqi airport. His mission was to oversee the private contractors training of
Iraqi troops that has been negligent at best due to the priority of private
subcontracts making money at the expense of responsibility.
Mr. Orrin Hatch, and various troglodytes in the Republican party have all
stated that we can't bring the troops home until we finish the job.
What exactly is the job? To spend eight times the money so government
contractors can make a bundle without doing "the job" they are supposed to be
finishing. Most of the reconstruction funding has been eaten up by the high
profit margins and sub-sub contracting processes of skimming funds -- Company A
sub-contracts at 10% to company B who subcontracts at 10% to company C, which
increases the cost by 1+.10 to the 3rd power ... an overall 33% increase just
because C signed a paper that was routed through B and A.
This is not about government waste. This is about private firms being
permitted to exploit the government by cronies and Bush administration
officials AT THE EXPENSE OF THE INTEGRITY AND PURPOSE OF THE MISSION that was
purported to be the reason for invading Iraq.
So for all you damn morons with concrete keeping your eyes closed, we were not
invited by an Iraqi resistance movement to come save them from Saddam. The WMD
reason was bullshit from the start. The
damage created by our bombing alone nullifies whatever moral authority presumed
by the United States because we were not invited nor attacked -- nor were we or
anyone else threatened. So who was being intimidated by our big and bad "shock
and awe" ferociousness? Women and children? Electric power plants and sewage
treatment plants that have still not been rebuilt ?
I hear all those incredibly self-flattering talking points you
offer, but how do you create a stable economy when the privatization process is
importing workers and performing shabby service at high price? How do you
create a stable democracy when the political
process is completely corrupted by American bribery and intimidated by
nationalist insurgents?
What a very different history our own nation would have had, if Spain had
invaded the Colonies in lieu of "saving" us from the evil designs of King
George? Recall that Spain owned Mexico during the 1760s. Would we call the
rebels who formed roving bands "insurgents" ? Would we respect the
constitution had it been written by a court appointed Spaniard who wrote
various favorable codes into the document that favored Spanish merchants? Or if
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had been on Spain's payroll -- like
Chalabi and Allawi. What
if Spain started importing Italians for labor instead of hiring colonists, or
if colonial businesses had to compete with the large resource of invading
Spain's corporations?
We have found the enemy. And the enemy is us.
It completely amazes me how arrogant and out-right presumptuous the idea that
it was "our job" to invade Iraq in the name of freedom. Look at
the history of the United States and the history of global military in
general. How many times was there an unprovoked invasion which resulted in
freedom? The United States "invaded" the Phillipines, Cuba, and Nicaragua in
the early 20th Century, and all were followed by dictatorships and repressive
regimes because of the priority of economic profit over the jargon of "liberty"
that was uttered. We keep using the grand ole moral fervor of World War Two
and D-Day as the prism through which all else is seen, but that was a reaction
to the dangerous expansion of Japan and Germany.
This time it is us who is posturing before the world with militarist expansion.
(The UN telling us what to do? HA! Phooey! "I don't care what you say. I'm
gonna do it my way.") But the sad fact is we can't afford it, and yet there are
some fools still trying proudly to justify themselves with chivalric episodes
at the mighty expense of reality.
| Friday, 25 November 2005 at 18h 19m 0s | About spiraling down to the lowest denominator | I keep wanting to add to my post 2-posts ago, but at some point you have to
leave what was said behind and move on. I will edit and further elaborate on
a post within at most a four hour time-frame, and then move on, unless there is
a typographical error, a grammatical error, or a factual error.
Here is the statement upon which I desire to elaborate.
Only that is not how it works, nor how this happens. Corporations play state
governments off each other, just like they do globally with nations. Whoever
offers them the best deal gets the new factory, but that factory is still going
to get built incentive or not.
Let me first clarify, when I use the concatenated word "state/nation" I am
referring to both the 51 states in the US, the provinces of Canada and Mexico
and other countries of the world, and also the various nations of the world as
well. Each of these organizational units do occur at different levels, but
each exist as an economic unit that is separate from others. The stores and
factories exist within in the state of Ohio, the province of British Columbia
in Canada, and the nation of Vietnam all equally, albeit at larger forms of
permissible organization and economic activity.
Corporations play state, provincial, and national governments off each other to
get the best deal because global power has shifted to corporate forms of
financial accumulation and capital ownership. Power has shifted many times
over the last 5,000 years of human history. From tribal chieftans, to
religious patriarchy, to lords and the chain of feudal aristocracy, and then
slowly towards the diversified owners and participants of economic activity
that began sometime during the Medieval period circa 1,000 A.D. during the
flowering of chinese "mercantilism" and East Asian markets (Chinese trading
posts existed as far as modern day Mozambique on the coast of South-East
Africa.)
So this year state/nation A offers the cheapest labor and the most "incentives"
in the name of tax reductions, next year state/nation B offers even better, and
so on and so forth until you reach the lowest level of deal that any one
state/nation can go. Those state/nation's which don't get the new plant (ie.,
new corporate capital investment) lose out and don't get a source of jobs and a
revenue stream (money that flows within the state/nation, some of which gets
spent their, some of which gets taxed, etc...)
In this sense, there are winners and there are losers. The losers have less
money and control over resource allocation; the winners have more money and are
able to decide how to allocate resources. But the losers can also negotiate
cheaper sources of labor and more incentives, because something is better than
nothing when you have nothing. Meanwhile, those who were winning begin to
start losing jobs and control over how economies affect society.
The old-winners and old-losers swap places, but the ideology of "winning" does
not get replaced. In order to understand the ongoing transitions, the
descriptors of the winning ideology try to grapple with the need to describe
the losing that is occuring. People are portrayed as "lazy" when they don't do
all they can to make money. People who are homeless or poor are described
as "losers" or some pejorative phrase like "bums". Since "winning" take the
forms of making money and property ownership, those persons who appear absent
these foundations of the ideology must be on the opposite end of the value
system. The subtle parade of the value system embeds itself in all forms of
the culture, merely to reassure those most endeared to the value system of the
old "winning" ideology, which are quite often the same persons as the
plutocracy that isn't losing.
When this happens previously in history, and ideological shift occurs and the
human reaction is a rise to some understanding "nationalism," a sense that
humans should dictate how jobs and resources get distributed, not ephemeral or
arbitrary forces inside and out of the state/nation. Citizens get angry and
fustrated with their leaders or governing representatives and the urge to "take
control" of the "nation" grows past the critical point. The need to exert some
control over their lives and their history, the rise of "nationalism" is an
ancient human response.
| Thursday, 24 November 2005 at 4h 59m 25s | Tyranny versus Liberty | When the people fear the government
you have Tyranny.
When the government fears the people
you have liberty.
--Thomas Jefferson
| Wednesday, 23 November 2005 at 2h 0m 21s | Two interesting facts | Why do we need tax reform? According to Senator Byron
Dorgan:
There is a 5 story white building
in the Cayman islands where 12,000 American corporations keep the records of
their headquarters so they don't have to pay taxes on their income. They use
the 5 story building as post-office box to re-route their profits so those
profits are not taxed.
Last year 274 American
corporations made 1 trillion dollars in profits -- not revenue: these are
profits, what is left after all the bills are paid. Now for the kicker: ALL
BUT 72 PAID NO TAXES LAST YEAR.
Byron Dorgan,
Senator from North Dakota.
They want all the benefits of America, but don't want to pay for it.
Oh, but these corporations are paying workers and creating jobs, they say.
Accordingly, this argument goes, they can't compete in the global economy
because taxes are too high. Tax breaks are supposed to be an incentive for
corporations to "invest" and "innovate" and make a lot more money.
Only that is not how it works, nor how this happens. Corporations play state
governments off each other, just like they do globally with nations. Whoever
offers them the best deal gets the new factory, but that factory is still going
to get built incentive or not. Companies invest and innovate
when they can realize a greater market share or larger profit within the
foreseeable future, not because they pay less taxes. It is very true that
paying less taxes will make the bottom line better, but the function of making
the bottom line better is completely independent of taxation. That is my
point. Turning the faucet is not connected to the flow of water. Beyond the
extra-ordinary, the archaic, or the extreme, taxation is a just another cost
balanced against the revenue and is just economic background noise.
Companies also innovate when they can save money. But again, they can also
save money in other ways by paying less wages,
or transferring assets abroad where costs are cheaper and there are no
obligations of labor benefits. Innovations do not always have to be labor
and/or technology driven. (This bull does not wear all clothes alike.) They
can be driven by merely a desire or need to cut costs, and companies will do
this without tax breaks, or regardless of tax breaks. There is no causation.
Small businesses, home-owners can all benefit from tax breaks, and the result
is more spendable cash that can be used for other things. This supports the
community and functioning of the local economy, which is precisely the intended
result. Government is supposed to spend tax dollars for society's benefit, so
that the
cost of the benefit gets spread over all of the citizens and we all share the
burden, thus making the overall
cost cheaper. Our government functions for the people, and although every
nascent rising aristocraty will always try to take control of the government
for its own uses, the ideal is still the foundation of government -- which is
why marauders have to clothe their actions with the words of the great ideals.
Government subsidizes industry and communities when the benefit will not
occur any other way, or the initial investment is too prohibitive. This is how
plumbing, railroads, interstate highways, electricity, telephones, radio, the
internet, and
computers all eventually became independent. Before the technology has
advanced to a point where it becomes practical, the wisdom of the technology is
nevertheless worthy of support. Corporations cannot lose money hoping on a big
idea, when the competition is such that there is no guaranteed that a 10 year
investment will ever be realized. To some extent it is true that Research and
Development is a
function of re-invested profits, but since no corporation can re-invest more
money than there is available, the aggregation of a very large initial
investment is only possible through collective action. This collective can be
in the form of investors, but only government has the force of legal
requirement when the desired result runs counter to the profit motive.
A corporation is also not a small business or a home-owner, where a single
individual makes all the decisions and participates in all of the functions
necessary to operate the business or own the house. A corporation is a large
bureaucracy compartmentalized into specific functions, all of which are
coordinated by multiple layers of managers and officers all the way up to the
Board of Directors and the Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Maintaining the
files and records alone of corporate debts and assets might employ 1000 plus
persons. Departments produce reports and have meetings to discuss reports and
balance sheets. Stockholders vote for the Board of Directors by proxy, which
means anonymously. The stock price, and to some extent the value of the
corporation, is thus extremely dependent upon yearly profits, if for no other
reason than the inherent herd mentality of the asset markets. The pressure to
increase profits is very real, and should not be underestimated nor overlooked.
But that's just what the tax-break incentive myth does -- assumes that large
corporations respond the same way as individuals. The decisions of what to do
with any surplus cash are obviously not as simple as one person who gets some
extra money deciding to expand his painting business and hire 2 more workers --
assuming the same boss doesn't just add a garage to his home or install a new
pool in the backyard.
Tax incentives that are targeted work best when individual behaviors are
subsidized, like college expenses or insurance payments, not when they are
granted with
the abstract assumption that investments will get sponsored. The surplus just
gets added to the pile because they are not targeted or guaranteed to be spent
on anything specific. Hence they are actually a waste of investment, because
inevitably there will always be a sizeable percentage of the total that is not
going to get spent as desired.
When you give a benefit for college expenses, the money got spent on college
expenses. A lot of the so called "tax benefits" that corporations get is
really just window-dressing. Corn is subsidized so that all of the products
derived from corn have a cheap source of corn, which may arguably be a good
thing to have. However, all of the coal producing electricity plants got tax-
incentives for the last 10 years to help them modernize, but instead, they took
the money and did nothing, and 20,000 got a 20 year reprieve from having to
modernize by Bush in 2003. The nuclear energy industry has always been
subsidized (50 years worth) and is still neither practical nor sustainable. The
telephone corporation would never have hooked
up the current network absent government regulation. Without forcing the
corporation to perform an end result, the company would have sat on the tax-
benefits money and manipulated it's market position to monopolize and make more
money. And as we all know, politicians can be bought to keep passing on the
tax-benefits without creating a means of enforcement.
Why give $100,000 to the "someone" as an "incentive" to make loans, when you
could just give out the $100,000 directly as loans? Answer : so the "someone"
can get a cut of the business, of course.
And do you think the Oil conglomerates are going to invest in Solar or
alternative
energy that will cost the corporation lots of market share? At some point, the
corporation's drive for profits and market position diverge from the need to
modernize. In the long run, the changes will force them to the wall, but the
short term might be 50 years. Are we gonna ride on the backs of 2 generations
of
people waiting for the transition to "naturally" occur? Don't forget, bad
decisions are sometimes made, human vanity does not always enable the presumed
democratic competition of the economic order. Aristocracy and oligarchy and
plutocracy are all ancient Greek words for a reason, because they can
quite "naturally" occur.
| Wednesday, 23 November 2005 at 5h 36m 47s | They knew they were lying | This is really smoking hot.
Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel
By Murray Waas, special to National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005
Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified
briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi
regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible
evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda,
according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand
knowledge of the matter.
...
One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was
that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved
attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al
Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential
threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam
considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even
Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according
to records and sources.
The September 21, 2001, briefing was prepared at the request of the president,
who was eager in the days following the terrorist attacks to learn all that he
could about any possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
That is only the first 3%. Read on ...
| Wednesday, 23 November 2005 at 5h 24m 3s | Jean is full of Schmidt | This comes from Thinkprogress [SOURCE] and the Washington Monthly [SOURCE]
Marine Quoted By Schmidt Says He Never Mentioned Murtha
During Rep. Jean Schmidt’s (R-OH) shameful attack on Rep. Jack Murtha (D-PA) on
the House Floor she said she was communicating a message from Marine Colonel
Danny Bubp.
This is what Jean Schmidt said:
A few minutes ago I received a call from Colonel Danny Bubp, Ohio
Representative from the 88th district in the House of Representatives. He asked
me to send Congress a message: Stay the course. He also asked me to send
Congressman Murtha a message, that cowards cut and run, Marines never do. Danny
and the rest of America and the world want the assurance from this body – that
we will see this through.
Bubp denies he said that [SOURCE -- Cincinnati
Enquirer]:
Danny Bubp, a freshman state representative who is a colonel in the Marine
Corps Reserve, told The Enquirer that he never mentioned Rep. John Murtha, D-
Pa., by name when talking with Schmidt…”There was no discussion of him
personally being a coward or about any person being a coward,” Bubp said.
And further, from the NYTimes: [SOURCE -- at bottom of page]
...a spokeswoman for the colonel, Danny R. Bubp, said Ms. Schmidt had
misconstrued their conversation.
While Mr. Bubp, a Republican member of the Ohio House of Representatives,
opposes a quick withdrawal for forces, "he did not mention Congressman Murtha
by name nor did he mean to disparage Congressman Murtha," said Karen Tabor, his
spokeswoman. "He feels as though the words that Congresswoman Schmidt chose did
not represent their conversation."
|
|
|
One picture is the screed ... the other is for the cameras.
|
How about those eerie, scary blue-ish eyes looking up at ... "God" ? Receiving
signals from alien invaders? Seeing a golf ball coming at her from above? I
wonder how many photos had to be taken before they got her head tilted at just
the right angle, with just the right pose.
She's a front. She was the candidate that had to beat Iraq vet Paul Hackett
(with possible help, thanks to an 11th hour shift of 4,000 votes by the
computer counting - Diebold - machines in Ohio.
The 2nd Congressional District is East of Cincinnati, along the Ohio River.
Some Excerpts from the House Rules and Manual that Jean should read:
"In the practice of the House, a member is not permitted to refer to another
member by name, or to address him in the second person. The proper reference to
another member is 'the gentleman (or gentlewoman) from ...,' naming the
member's state.
"By rule of the House, as well as by parliamentary law, personalities are
forbidden, whether against the member in the member's capacity as
representative or otherwise, even if the references may be relevant to the
pending question. The House has censured a member for gross personalities. The
chair may intervene to prevent improper references where it is evident that a
particular member is being described. The chair does not rule on the veracity
of a statement made by a member in debate. Although accusing another member of
deceit engages in personality, merely accusing another member of making a
mistake does not.
"A member may not read in debate extraneous material critical of another
member, which would be improper if spoken in the member's own words."
And remember, Murtha is merely conveying what will happen eventually. He is
not "cutting and running" like a "coward." This insidious wench was merely
trying to help the Rethuglican "team" gain political points, since in her mind
this is a vituperative trench fight not a rational discussion about policy
decisions. And her insistence that "we see this through" was more for the
purpose of insisting that congressman Murtha said otherwise.
This is how the party "strategists" (goons??) create an opposition movement by
allocating to "the opponent" an untruth, whilst the wily politician takes the
truth position for themself.
These are the games they play. They don't listen to you. You are the enemy.
While you are speaking, their minds are spinning trying to figure out their
next counter move -- so of course they don't really hear a word you say.
| Tuesday, 22 November 2005 at 2h 42m 3s | Roll out the presses, xmas shoppers are on the march |
| Tuesday, 22 November 2005 at 2h 43m 48s | They are foolish and have no shame | Who are these people, standing
before
the
microphones
and
disparaging
John
Murtha's 37 years of Marine service and playing word games by accusing his bill
as "cutting and running."
Then, on Friday, the Republican leadership attempts to sneak a "substitute"
bill drawn up by California Republican Duncan Hunter (boo, hiss) by calling a
vote on the resolution. Thankfully
representative Lantos was keen enough to ask what bill was before the House,
and thus forcing the House speaker to legally state the bill. [SOURCE] Had the vote occurred, Democrats could have been
lured into thinking they voted for another bill. This trick has been pulled by
the Republicans -- and Lyndon Baines Johnson even -- before. Thankfully,
Lantos was wise to them this time.
Good thing too, because the two resolutions are very different.
Murtha has proposed his own resolution that would force the president to
withdraw the nearly 160,000 troops in Iraq "at the earliest practicable date."
It would establish a quick-reaction force and a nearby presence of Marines in
the region. It also said the U.S. must pursue stability in Iraq through
diplomacy.
The Republican alternative: "It is the sense of the House of Representatives
that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately."
[SOURCE]
That's the entire Hunter resolution by the way. We get "the sense." Which
sense, the sense of "smell" -- cause that's what this does, it smells.
Congressman Duncan Hunter,52nd District of California
(East of San Diego)
|
|
|
" Believe everything they tell me to say. Trust me. The honesty and
integrity will become more obvious as my hands approach one another while I am
speaking. "
|
This is the same Duncan Hunter who earlier in the year read the menu of the
Guantanamo Prisoners, so as to dispel any notions that prisoner abuse and
torture were not occuring merely because he is reading a "menu" given to him
purporting to come directly from spot. He recently also sponsored building
a "wall" along the entire border between Mexico and the United States.
Sounds like the Berlin Wall to me, Mr. HUNTER.
Keep in mind that this is the chairman of the House Armed Services
Committee during this time of egregious corruption in the sub-contracting
process of military procurement, and when 9 billion of 18 billion to be spent
cannot be accounted for and in which was specifically written by law to be
spent on Reconstruction in Iraq.
Accordingly "snake-oil" salesman Rep. Duncan Hunter R-Calif., chairman of the
House Armed Services Committee, said that the above resolution vote was not a
stunt. "This
is not an attack on an individual. This is a legitimate question," he said, in
the sourced article.
Oh really? So if it is a "legitimate question" then why try to sneak in an
alternative
resolution without making clear which resolution, Hunter's or Murtha's was
about to be voted upon. You see how this works, eh. Those who did not pay
attention, only thought the fight was about some "legitimate question," when
the fight was really about the secretive tactics. This is how these
Rethuglicans (damn near everyone) and a few spineless Democrats (Lieberman and
Biden) play the game. They know that at least 80% of the people will not know
the details or even the actual series of events, so what the TV audiences and
the corporate newspapers get is the offsetting quotes -- with very little or
not enough background information.
(Which is why the sourced yahoo article comes from a writer of the
Associated Press -
- the "associated" means some writer wrote another story and distributed it
across the wire, as opposed to a writer from the staff of a particular
newspaper.)
85 to 90 percent of the article is a quotation, or mentions conflicts and
disagreements in lieu of a quotation without detailing either conflict or
disagreement.
It's like, He said,she said, he said, oh and by the way 1+1=2, and then
finally, he said. Story over.
Uh .... hello! Who cares what the @*$$!* he or
she said, what the hell happened !!!!
Just look how the article describes the voting scenario. Each of the bolded
parts are deliberate subjective choices of description
The Republican-controlled House spurned calls for an immediate pullout
of troops from Iraq in a vote hastily arranged [ie, not forced by the
Murtha resolution] by the GOP that Democrats vociferously denounced as
politically motivated...
...Democrats accused Republicans of orchestrating a political stunt that
prohibited thoughtful debate on the issue, and nearly all voted against the
measure.
...The House action came in a week that also saw the GOP-controlled Senate
defeat a Democratic push for President Bush to lay out a timetable for
withdrawal. Instead, senators approved a statement that 2006 should
be a significant year in which conditions are created for the phased
withdrawal of U.S. forces.
...In little more than 24 hours, Hastert and Republicans decided to put the
question to the House.
...Republicans hoped to place Democrats in an unappealing position — either
supporting a withdrawal that critics said would be precipitous or opposing it
and angering voters who want an end to the conflict. They also hoped the
vote could restore GOP momentum on an issue — the war — that has seen
plummeting public support in recent weeks.
Democrats said it was a sham and quickly decided to vote against the resolution
in an attempt to drain it of significance.
Nowhere in this damn piece of $#@@**!% article are the major facts that
occurred. The Republicans tried to put their own Resolution before the vote
without making clear what was being voted upon. That resolution was one
sentence long and only conveyed "a sense" of doing something. And the Murtha
resolution was not a call for immediate withdrawal, as the Hunter resolution
suggests with a "sense". But apparently, according to
the ap writer "Republicans hoped to place Democrats in an unappealing
position — either supporting a withdrawal that critics said would be
precipitous or opposing it and angering voters who want an end to the
conflict."
Indeed, was that the choice according to the ubiquitous "critics" ? A choice
between a "precipitous" withdrawal or "angering voters." Was that the choice?
Thank you bullshit ap hack writer for such an insightful clue about your true
purpose on the ap wire. Notice that in the paragraph above I can summarize in
3 sentences what you could not even mention in the entirety of your epic
whitewashing of the event.
However, the Republican's got other strings to pull, and quickly get on the
trail of yet another auspicious ethics
probe ... ?
From Roll Call (the House record of business each day):
GOP Lawmakers Float Ethics Probe of Murtha Republican lawmakers say that ties
between Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) and his brother’s lobbying firm, KSA
Consulting, may warrant investigation by the House ethics committee.
So they go around attacking the credentials and ideas of John Murtha and then
they try to sneak through a fake bill so they don't have to vote on the
real "Murtha bill" ...
argh, this truly is disgusting.
Our boys are dying because they can't accept reality without first trying to
milk the events for some political gain. This is not about "cutting and
running." This is about redeployment. According to the Pentagon, no amount of
time or addition of troops will improve the situation in Iraq. The troops will
be drawn down and redeployed by the military anyway. Murtha is just saying
publically what is already in the works.
But these Republicans have to take their politics to the level of sewage pipes
underneath the streets. But then that is where the rats live and breed, so go
figure.
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