Just Chewing on the (Wing) Nuts
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said today that President Bush’s expectation that his successor would inherit the problems in Iraq was “the height of irresponsibility” and that Americans “should expect him to extricate our country” from the war there before he leaves office in early 2009.
As Little George’s lifetime record of complete failures shows, he mismanages something into the ground, then expects someone else to clean up his mess…
Representative John D. Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who is the chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, said, “The president’s proposal would do little to help the uninsured, but would undermine the employer-based system through which 160 million people get coverage.”
Richard J. Umbdenstock, president of the American Hospital Association, agreed. “The tax proposal would have the effect of driving people to the small-group insurance market — a market that has proved unstable,” Mr. Umbdenstock said. “For many people, even with a tax break, coverage would remain unaffordable.”
Moreover, Mr. Josten said, a health plan may be expensive because it covers older workers with major medical problems, not because it is “gold-plated.” A single mother, working as a low-paid secretary at a law firm, could be pushed into a higher tax bracket because she participates in an $18,000 health plan covering older men who have had heart attacks and expensive surgery, Mr. Josten said.
Treasury officials acknowledged that some people with costly, comprehensive benefits had modest incomes.
A tax increase on poor working people thar threatens their health insurance coverage, gosh what a clever idea…
“During its July 12-August 14 air war against Lebanon, Israel dropped more than a million cluster bombs in southern Lebanon, according the United Nations, to counter Hezbollah rocket attacks that were killing Israelis.
The cluster munitions, which spread bomblets over a wide area from a single container, included artillery shells, rockets and bombs dropped from aircraft, many of which the US sold to Israel years ago, a US official told the daily.
The Arms Export Control Act bans the use of cluster munitions against populated areas. Israel says Lebanese civilians were not targeted but were warned ahead of the action by dropped leaflets.
Some State Department and Pentagon officials believe Israel used the cluster bombs in self-defense, while others contend they violated US law because they were used on populated areas, officials familiar with the debate told the newspaper.
“It is important to remember the kind of war Hezbollah waged,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told the Times.
“They used innocent civilians as a way to shield their fighters.”
The sanctions could include a ban on the sale of cluster weapons to Israel similar to the six-year ban imposed 25 years ago under then US president Ronnie Raygun, after Israel used cluster munitions in its 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
It’s sad to see Israel sink so low as to deliberately target innocent children in it’s own campaign of terror. For shame…
“It’s not the American people or the U.S. Congress who are emboldening the enemy,” said Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., and White House hopeful in 2008. “It’s the failed policy of this president — going to war without a strategy, going to war prematurely.”
Wouldn’t want to “embolden” the suicide bombers… 
Militia fighters attacked a provincial headquarters in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, killing five American soldiers Saturday night, the U.S. military reported.
The statement said “an illegally armed militia group” attacked the building with grenades, small arms and “indirect fire,” which usually means mortars or rockets.
“A meeting was taking place at the time of the attack to ensure the security of Shiite pilgrims participating in the Ashoura commemorations,” said Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, deputy commander for Multi-National Division-Baghdad.
Brooks said the meeting was taking place in the Provincial Joint Coordination Center in Karbala when the attack occurred. Iraqi officials and security forces as well as U.S. troops were present, he said.
Earlier Saturday, Karbala Gov. Akeel al-Khazaali had said U.S. troops raided the provincial headquarters looking for wanted men but left with no prisoners.
But Brooks said that report was incorrect.
“Initial reporting by some media outlets indicated falsely that the attack was conducted by coalition forces,” he said.
Weird story, conflicting accounts, “illegally” armed militia? In Iraq? What the hell does that even mean? I smell screwup, as in possible friendly fire screwup. Whatever, it means 20 more families lost a loved one today, more kids without fathers, more mothers without sons. All for the glory of Bush…
S(ad)Squirrel
Look, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it.
-Rush Limbaugh
Rush is no longer going to be on the air on WJBC. Radio Bloomignton General Manager Red Pitcher announced this afternoon the syndicated Rush Limbaugh Show will air for the last time March 2, 2007. Pitcher tells WJBC’s Steve and Beth on The Drive, local programming will replace Rush.
Do you really want to go out this way Rush?
“John McCain is tanking,” says ARG president Dick Bennett. “That’s the big thing [we’re finding]. In New Hampshire a year ago he got 49 percent among independent voters. That number’s way down, to 29 percent now.”
American Research Group, which is New Hampshire’s leading polling company and has been operating in the state since 1976, polled 1,200 likely Granite State voters in the survey.
Bennett says ARG is finding a similar trend in other states polled, including early primary battlegrounds like Iowa and Nevada. “We’re finding this everywhere,” he says.
The main reason isn’t hard to find: His hawkish stance on the Iraq war, which is tying him ever more closely to an unpopular president. “Independent support for McCain is evaporating because they view him as tied to Bush,” says Bennett.
“It’s significant that McCain is going down rather than up at this critical juncture in the early maneuvering,” comments Larry Sabato, who chairs the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “It suggests that, contrary to conventional wisdom, John McCain may not be secure as the GOP front-runner. But a lot can change.”
Couldn’t happen to a nicer toad, I’m sure Jerry Falwell will say a prayer for him…
“We now know that Nixon and Henry Kissinger had no illusions that the war could be won, and Nixon probably could have withdrawn U.S. troops in a way that didn’t polarize the public. Such a stance, however, ran counter to Nixon’s deepest instincts. For Nixon, politics was about dividing the electorate and demonizing enemies. Even as he drew down U.S. forces, he did all he could to inflame the war’s already flammable opponents in the hope that however much the people might dislike the war, they would dislike its critics more.”
The guy to watch in all this is the pooh-bah of Fox News, Roger Ailes. Nixon’s onetime aide guides a TV network that is Nixonian to its bones — Fox’s raison d’?tre is to bash liberals, real or imagined. But Ailes can’t be insensible to the war’s effects on Republican electoral prospects. If Fox News were to break with Bush on Iraq, that would be proof positive that even the Nixonians believe there’s no way, politically, they can salvage this miserable war.
I predict Nixon…
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A suicide car bomb struck a market in the Shiite district of Sadr City and police said 17 people died Wednesday, a day after a blast targeting university students killed 70 in what appeared to be a renewed campaign of Sunni insurgent violence against Shiites.
The latest explosion occurred at 3:55 p.m. near the outdoor Mereidi market, one of the neighborhood’s most popular commercial centers, and also injured 33 people, police said. The force of the blast shattered the windows of nearby stores and restaurants.
On Tuesday, twin car bombs struck Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, not far from Sadr City, as students lined up for the ride home, leaving at least 70 dead and more than 130 injured.
Another suicide car bomb exploded earlier Wednesday at a checkpoint in the city of Kirkuk after guards opened fire as the driver approached a police station, police said. The blast killed eight people and injured dozens.
The explosion in the center of the oil-rich city 180 miles north of Baghdad came amid rising violence in northern Iraq even as the government and U.S. forces prepare to launch a massive security operation aimed at stopping sectarian attacks in the capital.
In other violence, a mortar attack on a residential area in Iskandariyah, 30 miles south of the capital, killed a woman and injured 10 people, police said.
Police also said they found the body of an Iraqi policeman whose hands and legs had been bound hanging by electric wire, two days after he was kidnapped while going to his home in the same area.
Gunmen in a car also opened fire on two brothers, aged 30 and 35, on their way to work as construction workers in Mahaweel, 35 miles south of Baghdad. One was killed and the other was wounded, police said.
In Baghdad, a civilian was killed in a drive-by shooting in the west, while a roadside bomb struck a downtown commercial district, injuring a policeman and a bystander, police said.
Five unidentified bodies were found by Iraqi police. Two of them were apparently killed by a sniper on Haifa Street, a Sunni Arab stronghold in Baghdad that has seen recent fierce clashes. The others were found shot to death with their hands and legs bound in areas in western Baghdad, police said.
Either that or the dogs been eating broccoli again…
DES MOINES, Iowa - Lance Armstrong urged Iowans on Tuesday to support a presidential candidate who is dedicated to expanding cancer research.
“The cancer question has to be asked, and it has to be on the agenda for the most powerful man in the world,” Armstrong said.
Everyone should stop by and wish Jane well on her surgery tomorrow…
The I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s case will put on display the secret strategizing of an administration that cherry-picked information to justify war in Iraq and reporters who traded freely in gossip and protected their own interests as they worked on one of the big Washington stories of 2003.
The estimated six-week trial will pit current and former Bush administration officials against one another and, if Cheney is called as expected, will mark the first time that a sitting vice president has testified in a criminal case. It also will force the media into painful territory, with as many as 10 journalists called to testify for or against an official who was, for some of them, a confidential source.
Presiding U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton and lawyers for both sides will begin selecting 12 jurors along with alternates Tuesday. It is not expected to be an easy task, given the heavy publicity and the involvement of two institutions — the government and the news media — low in the public’s esteem. Preparing for strong feelings from some D.C. residents, Walton has assembled 100 prospective jurors and has a pool of 100 more standing by.
U.S. v. Libby boils down to two drastically different versions of the same events in the spring and summer of 2003. The government alleges that Libby was involved in a concerted White House effort to discredit Plame’s husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had publicly accused the Bush administration of twisting information he provided on Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. Wilson led a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger a year earlier and found no grounds for claims that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium there.
Eight days after Wilson went public with his claims, Plame’s identity as a CIA officer appeared in Novak’s column.
“It is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to ‘punish’ Wilson,” Fitzgerald wrote in a court filing last year.
Later, when a leak investigation was opened, prosecutors allege that Libby lied to FBI agents, telling them that he had learned about Plame from Russert in a telephone call on July 10 or 11 and that he had passed along that information as unconfirmed gossip to two other reporters.
The plainspoken Russert will be a star government witness. He has told Fitzgerald that Libby fabricated parts of a conversation with him. He has said that when he spoke with Libby in mid-July, Plame never came up as Libby complained that MSNBC host Chris Matthews had an antiwar slant.
“Satisfaction”
~Poot
The US forces in the “surge” into the Iraqi capital face a war on two fronts. The murder miles of Haifa Street and Adhamiyah are the homes to the Sunni insurgency, which continues its bloody course four years after the official end of the war, and there is no sign of this stopping as the US forces take on the Shias.
There are other logistical difficulties of fighting an urban guerrilla war in a city like Baghdad. The militias have spread from their power bases into the so called “mixed areas”. Outside the Hamra Hotel, where the dwindling group of Western journalists in Baghdad stays, there are checkpoints run by the Mehdi army, led by the radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr; their Shia competitors, the Badr Brigade; and the Kurdish Peshmerga. Further out are the Shia Defenders of Kadhamiyah, set up by Mr Sadr’s cousin Hussein al-Sadr and the government-backed Tiger and Scorpion Brigades.
They all look similar: balaclavas or wrap-around sunglasses and headbands, black leather gloves with fingers cut off, and a very lethal arsenal of weapons. When not manning checkpoints, they hurtle through the streets in 4×4s, scattering the traffic by firing in the air. It is impossible to say which particular group they belong to.
The main target, the Mehdi army, has around 50,000 well-armed fighters in the capital, mostly concentrated in Sadr City, the vast slum next to Baghdad, and the Shia holy city of Najaf and surrounding areas. But Mr Sadr also has 25,000 more militiamen in the south, where British forces will be in the firing line of retaliation for what the Americans do in Baghdad.
The UK military has withdrawn from much of the south, concentrating its 7,200 troops in Basra. US authorities were against the British pullout from much of Maysan province, including the capital, Amarah, and are now particularly concerned about plans to hand over all security in the province, including the long Iranian border, to the Iraqi government at the end of February.
At present the Americans have more or less withdrawn from the streets of the city, leaving Iraqi forces to man the checkpoints. Instead they base themselves in “Fort Apaches” - heavily fortified camps - emerging to carry out operations, invariably with the use of pulverising, and sometimes indiscriminate, firepower. After being reinforced by some 20,000 troops, the Americans will once again deploy on the streets. Baghdad will be divided into either nine or 11 sectors, according to different contingency plans being drawn up, in which the US troops will work alongside Iraqi forces with “embedded” US personnel.
The soldiers will aim to create mini “green zones” - cut-down versions of the area in the capital where US and British officials, and the Iraqi government, take refuge - guarded by checkpoints, sandbags and barbed wire. Residents would be issued with ID badges, and their every entry and exit logged.
To do this the US and Iraqi government forces will have to win back these areas from the militias. In particular they will have to take on the Shia fighters, many of them government backed, who have been accused of operating death squads.
Ironically, these death squads are the direct by-product of US policy. At the beginning of 2004, with no end to the Sunni insurgency in sight, the Pentagon was reported to have decided to train Shia and Kurdish fighters to carry out “irregular missions”. The policy, exposed in the US media, was called the “Salvador Option” after the US-backed counter-insurgency in Latin America more than 20 years ago, which led to 70,000 deaths and countless violations of human rights. Some of the most persistent allegations of abuse have been made against the Wolf Brigade. Their main US adviser until April last year was James Steele, who states in his autobiography that he commanded the US military group in El Salvador during the height of the guerrilla war. The complaints against Iraqi special forces continue.
I wrote about this evil f**k, Steele, last year, and his roll in setting up the Wolf Brigade, a “Special Forces” unit set up by the US that basically operated as a death sqaud out of the Interior Ministry basement. They hunted down and tortured and killed suspect Sunnis and were the prime cause of the lovely civil war we have today. (Not terrorist instigators…suprise!) I’m sure there will be a book or two on the Wolf Brigade one of these days, and I’m also sure the US media will ignore it. But as I’ve often pointed out, when the guys on your side wear black hoods to work(they started the fad, now everyone’s doing it…pfft!), you’re on the wrong fucking side…
~SSquirrel
Ledger-Enquirer columnist Tim Chitwood joined the pool, and concluded that “bleating like a sheep . . . would be a fun way to capture the sense of being in a flock of reporters herded from one pen to another, which is what happens when you are in the press pool covering a visit from the president.
“You go where you are told, talk to those who are authorized to talk to you, and you do not do anything else.
“Ever turn on the evening news and find one network’s coverage is much like another’s? This is why.”
Happy Third Anniversary to Dan, the best thing on the web, period.
Keep Kickin’ It, Dan!
“Assuring there would be no discordant notes here, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, the base commander, banned the 300 soldiers who had lunch with the president from talking with reporters. If any of them harbored doubts about heading back to Iraq, many for the third time, they were kept silent.”
