Of course, Iraq is nowhere near Pakistan. In fact, Baghdad — the capital of Iraq — is over 1,500 miles from Pakistan's capital of Islamabad:
Before McCain repeats his claim to "know how to win wars," he should probably look at a map.
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/07/21/mccain-warns-of-hard-struggle-on-the-iraq-pakistan-border/
When did American troops become "warfighters" -- members of "Generation Kill" -- instead of citizen-soldiers? And when did we become so proud of declaring our military to be "the world's best"? These are neither frivolous nor rhetorical questions. Open up any national defense publication today and you can't miss the ads from defense contractors, all eagerly touting the ways they "serve" America's "warfighters." Listen to the politicians, and you'll hear the obligatory incantation about our military being "the world's best."
All this is, by now, so often repeated -- so eagerly accepted -- that few of us seem to recall how against the American grain it really is. If anything -- and I saw this in studying German military history -- it's far more in keeping with the bellicose traditions and bumptious rhetoric of Imperial Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II than of an American republic that began its march to independence with patriotic Minutemen in revolt against King George.
So consider this a modest proposal from a retired citizen-airman: A small but meaningful act against the creeping militarism of the Bush years would be to collectively repudiate our "world's best warfighter" rhetoric and re-embrace instead a tradition of reluctant but resolute citizen-soldiers.
Al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar legally residing in the United States, was initially arrested in his home in Peoria, Illinois, on ordinary criminal charges, then imprisoned by military authorities.
The government, which says he has ties to Al Qaeda, designated him an enemy combatant, even though it never alleged that he was in an army or carried arms on a battlefield. He was held on the basis of extremely thin hearsay evidence.
Last year, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, based in Richmond, Virginia, declared that the government could not hold al-Marri, or any other civilian, simply on the president's orders. If it wanted to prosecute him, the court ruled, it could do so in the civilian court system.
That was the right answer. Unfortunately, last week the full 4th Circuit reversed the decision, and with a tangle of difficult-to-decipher opinions, upheld the government's right to hold al-Marri indefinitely. The court ruled that al-Marri must be given greater rights to challenge his detention. But this part of the decision is weak, and he is unlikely to get the sort of procedural protections necessary to ensure that justice is done.
The implications are breathtaking. The designation "enemy combatant," which should apply only to people captured on a battlefield, can now be applied to people detained inside the United States. Even though al-Marri is not a U.S. citizen, the court's reasoning appears to apply equally to citizens.
By Joe Conason
Listening to the mouthpieces of the oil industry on talk radio and cable television -- as well as in the Bush White House -- one gets the impression that we must start drilling in America's coastal waters immediately. If only we unleash the oilmen to explore and exploit, then the price of gasoline will start to fall, the scheming petroleum cartel will collapse, and the United States will be independent once again. And if we don't unleash the oilmen, then the Chinese communists will siphon off all the oil from the coast of Cuba before we can even launch a rowboat into the Caribbean.
None of that is true, of course. Producing oil from new offshore wells requires decades, and even when those resources come online they will have little impact on world prices, according to the government's own studies. Fouling our shores with clots of tar will bring us no closer to freedom from foreign oil in the near, medium or long term.
And that tale about the Chinese drilling off Cuba is a hoax designed to gull the public into supporting the repeal of laws that restrict offshore drilling. But the phony Cuban oil story raises a pertinent question. If we really want to free ourselves from the death grip of the oil-exporting countries, maybe we should lift the embargo on trade and investment in Cuba.
"Too close to call." "Within the margin of error." "A statistical dead heat." If you've been following news coverage of the 2008 presidential election, you're probably familiar with these phrases. Media commentary on the presidential horserace, reflecting the results of a series of new national polls, has strained to make a case for a hotly contested election that is essentially up for grabs.
Signs of Barack Obama's weaknesses allegedly abound. The huge generic Democratic Party advantage is not reflected in the McCain-Obama pairings in national polls. Why, according to the constant refrain, hasn't Obama put this election away? A large number of Clinton supporters in the primaries refuse to commit to Obama. White working class and senior voters tilt decidedly to McCain. Racial resentment limits Obama's support among these two critical voting blocs. Enthusiasm among young voters and African-Americans, two groups strongly attracted to Obama, is waning. McCain is widely seen as better prepared to step up to the responsibilities of commander-in-chief. Blah, blah, blah.
While no election outcome is guaranteed and McCain's prospects could improve over the next three and a half months, virtually all of the evidence that we have reviewed - historical patterns, structural features of this election cycle, and national and state polls conducted over the last several months - points to a comfortable Obama/Democratic party victory in November. Trumpeting this race as a toss-up, almost certain to produce another nail-biter finish, distorts the evidence and does a disservice to readers and viewers who rely upon such punditry.
Consider the following.
Except for a few days when the Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls showed a tie, Barack Obama has led John McCain in every national poll in the past two months. Obama's average margin has consistently been in the 4-6 point range during this time. By contrast, the polls in 2000 and 2004 showed much more variation over time.
State polling data have also consistently given Obama the advantage. According to realclearpolitics.com, Obama is currently leading in 26 states and the District of Columbia with a total of 322 electoral votes; McCain is currently leading in 24 states with a total of 216 electoral votes. Obama is leading in every state carried by John Kerry in 2004 along with seven states carried by George Bush: Iowa, New Mexico, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, Nevada and Colorado.
Obama is leading in 11 of the 12 swing states that were decided by a margin of five points or less in 2004 including five of the six that were carried by George Bush. And while Obama has a comfortable lead in every state that John Kerry won by a margin of more than five points in 2004, McCain is in a difficult battle in a number of states that Bush carried by a margin of more than five points including such solidly red states as Indiana, Montana, North Dakota, Virginia, and North Carolina.
And remember these June and July polls may well understate Obama's eventual margin.
The ordination ceremony Sunday, at a historic Protestant church in the Back Bay, is the first such event to take place in Boston, one of the most Catholic cities in the nation.
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, in accord with Vatican teaching, says the participants in the ordination ceremony will be automatically excommunicating themselves.
Device is a new art gallery in La Jolla, California created by sculptor Greg Brotherton and his wife Amy. Their next show, Fantastic Contraption, opens July 19 (and runs through Sept. 2). The 18-artist show explores the leaky margins between humans and their machinery and includes some of my favorites: Stephane Halleux, Nemo Gould, Theo Kamecke, and Mike Libby (all of whom have appeared here on Make: Blog).
IDW Publishing has produced Device Volume 1: Fantastic Contraption, a gorgeous art book, to accompany the show. I was thrilled and honored to be asked to write the introduction for it.
The book is 140 full-color pages, sells for $20 ($13.60 on Amazon), and is available for pre-order now.
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NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN |
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by: Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
(Photo: Bill Moyers Journal)
Once again we're closing the barn door after the horse is out and gone. In Washington, the Federal Reserve has finally acted to stop some of the predatory lending that exploited people's need for money. And like Rip Van Winkle, Congress is finally waking up from a long doze under the warm sun of laissez-faire economics. That's French for turning off the alarm until the burglars have made their getaway.
Philosophy is one reason we do this to ourselves; when you worship market forces as if they were the gods of Olympus, then the gods can do no wrong - until, of course, they prove to be human. Then we realize we should have listened to our inner agnostic and not been so reverent in the first place.
But we also get into these terrible dilemmas - where the big guys step all over everyone else and the victims are required to pay the hospital bills - because we refuse to recognize the connection between money and politics. This is the great denial in democracy that may ultimately mean our ruin. We just don't seem able to see or accept the fact that money drives policy. It's no wonder that Congress and the White House have been looking the other way as the predators picked the pockets of unsuspecting debtors. Mega banking and investment firms have been some of the biggest providers of the cash vital to keeping incumbents in office. There isn't much appetite for biting - or regulating - the manicured hand that feeds them.
Guess who gave the most money to candidates in this 2007-08 federal election cycle? That's right, the financial services and real estate industries. They stuffed nearly $250 million into the candidate coffers.
http://www.truthout.org/article/mothers-milk-politics-turns-sour
The 1910 autochrome of medieval cosplayers, cropped above, and the monkey-on-a-rhino gelatin print below are in a set of early 20th century photographs from The George Eastman House, which has joined the flickr commons. I spotted this on photographer Raul Gutierrez' blog (a regular source of joy for me), and there he wrote:
Flickr Commons is a fantastic idea. My wish is that the whole thing could be taken further. Imagine an open source version of flickr dedicated to showing artwork and photography from public institutions in which users had the opportunity to contribute scholarly work or to group images into collections.
George Eastman House's photostream [Flickr]
I also loved this photo of Egyptian women in beautiful dresses; a woman in a fur throw with a corsage, and this stunning, simple portrait. Also, baby rhinos!
A reporter needed surgery for injuries to his ankle, crotch and chest, after being hit by what appeared to be pebbles fired by the gun. Two others were slightly injured in the incident...Shooting at gun control conference
According to the Chongqing Times, the home-made gun had been designed for shooting birds.
Author Elizabeth Royte chats about the bottled-water boom and backlash
Twenty years ago, you write, bottled water was a niche market in the U.S. Today, it's a more than $10 billion business. What the heck happened? Why did Americans start drinking so much bottled water?
The simplest reason is marketing. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on advertising that either told us explicitly or implied that bottled water was better. [Bottled-water companies] used words like pure and natural, and used images of athletes and models and celebrities -- the advertisements were aspirational, they told us we'd be more like these people if we drank this product.The group stayed at the disco for at least two hours. One senior aide was approached by an attractive Chinese woman. The couple danced and later disappeared together.Link (via /.)The security official said: "In these circumstances it was not wise. Nobody knows exactly what happened after they left. But the next morning he came forward and said: "My BlackBerry is missing." The prime minister's Special Branch protection team were alerted.
Journalism, by nature, is not difficult. It really isn't. Most of the key attributes for solid reporting and editing come naturally to most people; fairness, hard work, and -- most important -- common sense.
News judgment, for instance, consists mostly of editors and producers using common sense to determine, based on the limited resources at hand, which breaking events and stories should be covered, and which ones can be set aside as less important.
During the slow summer months of a presidential campaign, that judgment and that common sense is usually even easier to put into practice because, traditionally, so little happens on the campaign trail with the candidates that what ought to be covered becomes self-evident.
Yet the Beltway press corps has become so borderline dysfunctional that even the simplest tasks, such as selecting which stories to cover -- such as using common sense -- now escape most of the major players at the mainstream news organizations.
Two events in recent days reaffirmed that sad conclusion, when entire news organizations opted to throw all sorts of time and attention at what was essentially a pointless campaign-related sideshow, while simultaneously displaying blanket indifference to what should have been the campaign story of the week, if not the month or possibly the entire summer.
Heath Shuler, the Democratic rookie from the 11th District of North Carolina, is going to have a much easier race this November than previously predicted. His opponent, Dr. Carl Mumpower, has suspended his campaign. This has been reported in some Washington DC outlets like Politico, The Hill, and CQPolitics, but the story is told best from the 11th District and the Ashville Citizen-Times:
"I am grateful for this strong signal of unity from the District leaders and honored that my home county and the people who know me best were the first to officially get on board," Mumpower said. "When we get at least seven more county commitments out of the fifteen, then the people of WNC will know that our Republican Party organization stands for something they can count on. The campaign remains on hold until that foundation is firmly in place, and I will not yield."
In a Saturday letter to the 11th Congressional District Chair, Stephen Duncan, Mumpower announced his campaign was on hold until his party formally committed to its core principles and developed a process for holding Republican elected representatives to those principles.
Mumpower faces an uphill battle in unseating incumbent Congressman Heath Shuler, D-Waynesville, who was elected in 2006. But he said Monday he felt he must take this step before proceeding with his campaign.
"I'm not going to be doing any fundraising or advertising — there won't be any active campaigning for the Republican Party," Mumpower said Monday. "I'll put things on hold until I get party officials to commit to the principles and to the process of holding elected officials accountable."
Mumpower, an Asheville City Councilman, said he was particularly troubled by a recent vote in Congress to override President Bush's veto of the Farm Bill. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole, R-N.C., and Shuler, a Waynesville Democrat, both voted to override a bill that Mumpower says is laden with "pork and special interests."
Citing core principles of small government, fiscal restraint and stricter immigration enforcement, Mumpower said his party has strayed from what the American people want.
Oh, this could very well be a "tactic," but the reasons behind Mumpower's decision are telling. He's saying that Republicans in this country are not living up to their principles. In short, he is acknowledging that the Republican Brand is broken. Given Republicans and their hesitancy in recognizing that they've spoiled their reputation, it is also surprising that other Republicans agree with Mumpower that the Republican brand is broken:
http://allspinzone.com/wp/2008/07/17/gop-candidate-quits-cites-broken-republican-brand/
by Nick Langewis
Former Senator turned energy lobbyist Trent Lott (R-MS) falsely claimed, during a Tuesday MSNBC appearance in support of drilling for oil offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, that Hurricane Katrina didn't cause oil spills.
"We didn't have one drop of oil [spilled] when we had the biggest hurricane in recent history, Hurricane Katrina," Lott said on Tuesday. "I think that the American people," he added, "are saying 'Look, do whatever is necessary, do it all, and do it now.'"
Former Senator and lobbyist John Breaux, a Democrat hailing from the gulf state of Louisiana, said that opponents of offshore drilling should reconsider. "We've shown that for the last sixty years you can do it safely, you can develop all natural domestic resources here in the United States, and it can be done safely."
Oil spills, in fact, numbered over 100 in the hurricane's aftermath, plaguing New Orleans and nearby areas and also contaminating the Mississippi River. The Coast Guard, MSNBC itself reported in September of 2005, estimated that 7 million gallons of oil, between 44 separate facilities around southeastern Louisiana, had been spilled as a result of the storm.
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Officials_lobbyists_spread_false_not_drop_0716.html
A school boy poses in front of an anti-US mural in Tehran, Iran. Photograph: Morteza Nikoubazl/Reuters
The US is planning to establish a diplomatic presence in Tehran for the first time in 30 years, a remarkable turnaround in policy by president George Bush who has pursued a hawkish approach to Iran throughout his time in office.
The Guardian has learned that an announcement will be made in the next month to establish a US interests section in Tehran, a halfway house to setting up a full embassy. The move will see US diplomats stationed in the country.
The news comes at a critical time in US-Iranian relations. After weeks that have seen tensions rise with Israel conducting war games aimed at Iran and Tehran carrying out long-range missile tests, a thaw appears to be under way.
The White House announced today that William Burns, a senior state department official, is to be sent to Switzerland on Saturday to hear Tehran's response to a European offer aimed at resolving the nuclear standoff.
Burns is to sit down at the table with Iranian officials in spite of Bush repeatedly ruling out direct talks on the nuclear issue until Iran suspended its uranium enrichment progamme, a possible first step on the way to building a nuclear weapon capability.
"The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet."...
...Aristotle.
Guest commentary by Poor Elijah (Peter Berger).
No Child Left Behind, the nation's federal education law, may have taken a backseat to the rocketing price of gasoline in the public mind, but policymakers haven't lost their focus. In an effort to rationalize the billions of dollars and classroom hours devoured by NCLB, the Center on Education Policy, a Washington think tank, recently released a double dose of "good news" that "student achievement is increasing, and the [racial] achievement gap is narrowing." The evidence underlying this optimistic conclusion was spelled out in Education Week's definitive headline "Since NCLB Law, Test Scores on Rise."
Well, not exactly. Looking behind the headline, the scores in question are actually the percentages of each state's students that have satisfied their state's own definition of "proficient" on their state's own test. With reviews of modern assessment typically running somewhere between skeptical and scathing, these often subjectively-derived rubric ratings dressed up as data have been further compromised by NCLB's looming 2014 deadline, by which date all of each state's students must be performing at the "proficient" level, or else. Since human beings of any age will never all be academically proficient by any date, state definitions of proficiency have eased as the deadline has loomed closer.
Further dimming the rosy first impression, while student scores appear to have risen somewhat on state tests, scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the "nation's report card," haven't shown the same gains. In 2007 the National Center for Education Statistics found not only "absolutely huge" variations among states' standards, but also that the "gaps" between NAEP data and states' own testing results "have grown to unprecedented levels" since NCLB became law. Many states claiming more widespread "proficiency" have simply "set less stringent standards for meeting that threshold," leading to grave doubts as to whether gains on state tests are "real or illusory." Even if the improved scores were in any way meaningful, the report concludes that it's "impossible" from their results to determine whether NCLB has "produced gains or decreases in student learning."
NCLB's excesses aside, the present decade has seen schools beginning to veer back from the touchy-feely, content-light "reforms" that have governed public education since the 1970s. Perhaps students are learning more now because more schools are rightfully refocusing on core academics.
Don't start celebrating yet. The experts who helped bring you the past thirty years of education decline are attempting to capitalize on the understandable dissatisfaction with NCLB and to resuscitate their old bankrupt reforms as if they weren't responsible for the scholastic disaster NCLB was commissioned to repair. One resuscitator calls for "new forms of school and schooling." He faults "traditional" schools because they "cannot ensure that all students will learn." In short, he rejects nearly everything about NCLB except its impossible objective.
It was billed as a panel discussion on "the global shift in human consciousness." A half-dozen speakers had assembled inside the Heebie Jeebie Healers tent at Burning Man, the annual post-hippie celebration in Black Rock, Nev., where 50,000 stalwarts braved intense dust storms and flash floods last August. Among the notables who spoke at the early evening forum was Dr. Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, the Bay Area-based psychochemical genius much beloved among the Burners, who synthesized Ecstasy and 200 other psychoactive drugs and tested each one on himself during his unique, offbeat career.
Sitting on the panel next to Shulgin was an unlikely expositor. Dr. James S. Ketchum, a retired U.S. Army colonel, told the audience, "When Sasha was trying to open minds with chemicals to achieve greater awareness, I was busy trying to subdue people."
Ketchum was referring to his work at Edgewood Arsenal, headquarters of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, in the 1960s, when America's national security strategists were high on the prospect of developing a nonlethal incapacitating agent, a so-called humane weapon, that could knock people out without necessarily killing anyone. Top military officers hyped the notion of "war without death," conjuring visions of aircraft swooping over enemy territory releasing clouds of "madness gas" that would disorient the bad guys and dissolve their will to resist, while U.S. soldiers moved in and took over.
Luxury Pods for Air Force Debated
The Air Force's top leadership sought for three years to spend counterterrorism funds on "comfort capsules" to be installed on military planes that ferry senior officers and civilian leaders around the world, with at least four top generals involved in design details such as the color of the capsules' carpet and leather chairs, according to internal e-mails and budget documents.
Production of the first capsule -- consisting of two sealed rooms that can fit into the fuselage of a large military aircraft -- has already begun.
Air Force officials say the government needs the new capsules to ensure that leaders can talk, work and rest comfortably in the air. But the top brass's preoccupation with creating new luxury in wartime has alienated lower-ranking Air Force officers familiar with the effort, as well as congressional staff members and a nonprofit group that calls the program a waste of money.
Air Force documents spell out how each of the capsules is to be "aesthetically pleasing and furnished to reflect the rank of the senior leaders using the capsule," with beds, a couch, a table, a 37-inch flat-screen monitor with stereo speakers, and a full-length mirror.
The effort has been slowed, however, by congressional resistance to using counterterrorism funds for the project and by lengthy internal deliberations about a series of demands for modifications by Air Force generals. One request was that the color of the leather for the seats and seat belts in the mobile pallets be changed from brown to Air Force blue and that seat pockets be added; another was that the color of the table's wood be darkened.
Changing the seat color and pockets alone was estimated in a March 12 internal document to cost at least $68,240.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/17/AR2008071703161.html
Not to be outdone in the hopeless military adventurism department, Barack Obama promises a "surge"--not in Iraq, but against the people of Afghanistan, who are even more fiercely opposed to U.S. occupation than Iraqis.
In a report released late Wednesday, the Senate subcommittee on investigations estimated that offshore abuses were costing U.S. taxpayers about $100 billion a year.
It recommended a range of reforms to squeeze tax cheats, including more stringent U.S. requirements for foreign banks and harsher penalties for financial institutions failing to provide the Internal Revenue Service with details on all accounts their American clients are holding.
http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.aspx?feed=AP&date=20080717&id=8905641
Saudi King Abdallah shakes rabbis' hands at the interreligious conference sponsored by King Juan Carlos of Spain. Le Monde's editorialist notes, "The first Saudi sovereign to visit the Vatican, where he met Benedict XVI [in 2007], today Abdullah does not fear evoking the common values of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam." (Photo: AP)
No one would have ever imagined associating Saudi Arabia with audacity in religious matters. Islam is practiced there in its most intransigent form - Wahabism, a variant on one of Sunni Islam's four great schools of thought, Hanbalism. The kingdom is also well-known for its inflexibility with respect to other religions - which may be practiced in that country underground only and in the most complete secrecy. This intransigence pertains as much to the thousands of - mostly Catholic - Philippine immigrants as to Shiite and Ismaelian Saudis of the Hasa and Najran provinces, whom the most radical Sunni sheiks too often hold to be miscreants.
Yet it's the Saudi sovereign, King Abdullah Ben Abdelaziz Al-Saud, who, on Wednesday, in the so very symbolic land of Spain, opened an interreligious conference that proclaims its intention of bringing together the three great religions of the Book, accustomed up until now to separate dialogues. Coming from a man who was long presented as an out-and-out conservative, and who, in the evening of his life in 2005, succeeded to the highest responsibilities in the land of Mecca and Medina, the initiative compels respect.
The first Saudi sovereign to visit the Vatican, where he met Benedict XVI, today Abdullah does not fear evoking the common values of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In the same spirit, he multiplies overtures to the Shiites, in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, even though there still remains much to be done to disarm sectarian hatreds.
So I tried to escape the toxic levels of wingnuttery this evening by flipping through my roommate's copy of Newsweek. Amazingly, I flipped to page 36 and found this:
To get a full accounting of how U.S. interrogation methods were used, the president should give those accused of 'war crimes' a pass.
By Stuart Taylor Jr. | NEWSWEEK
Dark deeds have been conducted in the name of the United States government in recent years: the gruesome, late-night circus at Abu Ghraib, the beating to death of captives in Afghanistan, and the officially sanctioned waterboarding and brutalization of high-value Qaeda prisoners. Now demands are growing for senior administration officials to be held accountable and punished. Congressional liberals, human-rights groups and other activists are urging a criminal investigation into high-level "war crimes," including the Bush administration's approval of interrogation methods considered by many to be torture.
It's a bad idea. In fact, President George W. Bush ought to pardon any official from cabinet secretary on down who might plausibly face prosecution for interrogation methods approved by administration lawyers.
Question: why did we ever develop the Geneva Conventions in the first place? Why does the Constitution ban cruel and unusual punishment? Hell, for that matter, why did we ever sign the goddamn Magna Carta*? Because what Stuart Taylor, Jr. is telling us is that government officials should simply be able to break the fucking law. And not just the laws against lying about blowjobs under oath — we're talking about laws against goddamn torture. We're talking about laws that for years have prohibited the government from performing cruel and heinous acts on prisoners. This is important shit. But to Stuart Taylor? Pfffffft, yeah it's bad, but so what? We'll only learn the truth about this stuff if we just pardon everyone beforehand. Because fuck it, laws are only meant to be obeyed by the little people.
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10 Republicans Abstain, Measure Passes 238-180...
Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.
There will be a hearing related to Rep. Dennis Kucinich's Article of Impeachment against George Bush in the House Judiciary Committee. That was assured by a vote of 238 to 180 on Tuesday. (Details on that hearing, now posted here.)
An unidentified government official of a U.S. ally wants to participate if and when Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich makes his case to impeach Bush before the House Judiciary Committee.
But, according to Keith Olbermann on MSNBC's "Countdown" last night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has mandated that questioning in the hearing be relegated to Bush's abuses of power, not his criminal wrongdoing.
"There's never been one [hearing] that accumulated all the things that constitute an imperial presidency," said Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, according to CQ Politics. He indicated topics covered in the hearing would include the firing of U.S. attorneys for political reasons, the betrayal of CIA agent Valerie Plame and Bush's alleged lying to Congress about the reasons for invading Iraq.
Kucinich's single Article of Impeachment only deals with Bush's lies to Congress.
There were no Democratic votes against holding the hearing. While 180 Republicans voted to follow their Dear Leader lock-step over the cliff, 10 Republicans abstained and nine Republican members of Congress voted with the Democrats. Here are their names...
Rep. Kevin Brady (Texas)
Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (Md.)
Rep. Walter B. Jones (N.C.)
Rep. Don Manzullo (Ill.)
Rep. Tim Murphy (Penn.)
Rep. Ron Paul (Texas)
Rep. Dave Reichert (Wash.)
Rep. Christopher Shays (Conn.)
Rep. Mike Turner (Ohio)
Kucinich, who earlier this week smartly summarized why Impeachment matters, promises a surprise witness against Bush. Also from CQ Politics: "An unidentified government official of a U.S. ally wants to participate if and when Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich makes his case to impeach President Bush before the House Judiciary Committee, according to the Ohio Democrat."
On Monday, during a town hall in Denver, John McCain proposed a radical "fix" for the way Social Security is funded. Responding to a questioner who claimed Social Security "will not be there" when current workers retire (which is wrong), McCain said this:
Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace, and it's got to be fixed.
As anyone who knows anything about Social Security understands, "paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers" is pretty much the functional definition of Social Security. Always has been. That's what John McCain is calling an "absolute disgrace."
http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/07/8936_mccain_social_security_disgrace.html
by Ted Rall
Nothing Honorable About the Vietnam War
Every presidential candidacy relies on a myth. Reagan was a great communicator; Clinton felt your pain. Both storylines were ridiculous. But rarely are the constructs used to market a party nominee as transparent or as fictional as those we're being asked to swallow in 2008.
On the left--OK, not--we have Barack Obama. "The best orator of his generation!" says Ed Rendell, the Democratic power broker who has a day job as governor of Pennsylvania. "The best orator since Cicero!" Republican strategist Mary Matalin swoons. No doubt, Obama reads a mean speech. Take his Teleprompter away, though, and the dude is as lost as George Bush at a semiotics class. Forced to answer reporters' questions off the cuff, Obama is so afraid of messing up that he...carefully...spaces...each...word...apart...
so...he...can...see...them...
coming...wayyy...in...advance.
Still more laughable than the notion of Obama as the second coming of JFK is the founding myth of the McCain campaign: (a) he is a war hero, and (b) said heroism increases his credibility on national security issues. "A Vietnam hero and national security pro," The New York Times calls him in a typical media blandishment.
John McCain fought in Vietnam. There was nothing noble, much less heroic, about fighting in that war.
Some Americans may be suffering another of the periodic attacks of national amnesia that prevent us from honestly assessing our place in the world and its history, but others recall the truth about Vietnam: it was a disastrous, unjustifiable mess that anyone with an ounce of sense was against at the time.
This story was written by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Ali Frick, Benjamin Armbruster, and Brad Johnson.
Yesterday, citing the "squeeze of rising prices at the pump," President Bush rescinded the presidential moratorium on offshore drilling.
The moratorium on lease sales in the Outer Continental Shelf was established in 1990 by his father, George H.W. Bush, in response to the devastating Exxon Valdez oil spill and extended by President Clinton.
Bush's action pressures Congress to follow him in "capitulation to the oil companies" by lifting their moratorium, which must be renewed annually. In response, Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) said at a press conference that Bush "is invoking the specter of another WMD: wells of mass deception."
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| July 18th, 2008 A busy news week around the world and in celebrity uteri. The Pitt-Jolie babies came out, and Brad blogged on News Groper: "I wanted to name one of the babies Georgeclooneyisnumber1 but Angie said baby names aren't passwords." Obama responded to the Times criticism that there's nothing funny about him with a list of humorous factoids such as: "I was born in Hawaii. That's a weird state, right?" Read about those stories and more of our best below...  Me so happy by Brad Pitt Plenty of funny things about this guy! by Barack Obama Are these extra Eddie Murphys overcompensating for original Eddie Murphy not being funny? by Eddie Murphy I'm converting my dollars to euros and so should you by Donald Trump  My typical day as the former president by George W. BushRegards, The News Groper Editors | |
| News Groper is a network of fake parody blogs. | |
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