Blog For Free!
Archives
Home
2005 March
2004 July
2004 March
2004 February
2004 January
2003 December
2003 November
2003 October
2003 September
My Links
Monster Limo Weblog
Get Your War On
Howard Dean's official site
Winston Smith's blog
TomPaine.com
Connecticut for Clark
The Daily Howler
Monster Limo and Northern Transplant Weblogs staff retreat to Cape Cod
The Onion
Slate
Eric Alterman
Sulkbrarian
Buzzflash
Village Voice
The Democratic Underground
Ted Rall.com
SamAdams's Blog
AlterNet
New York Times
Joe Vs. Japan
tBlog
My Profile
Send tMail
My tFriends
My Images
Sponsored
Blog
|
| Republicans attack Dean for lies by deceptively misquoting |
| 12.03.03 (7:10 pm) [edit] |
In a speech in New Hampshire, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie fired back at Dean for a speech the Democrat gave accusing Bush of not understanding what it takes to defend the United States.
"This is the same critic who earlier in the year told Americans that we should prepare for the day when the United States 'won't always have the strongest military' -- former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean," Gillespie said in a speech at St. Anselm College in Manchester.
In true Republican fashion, Gillespie fell short of coming forth with the quotes entirety, which was that the United States will not have the strongest military if it does not "begin to use diplomacy as part of our foreign policy."
A far cry from the demonization the RNC chairman presented.
Personally, I don't mind the idea of a party attacking another. In today's political world, it's a must do, and specifically attacking Dean, from a Republican standpoint, makes sense. After all, he is the frontrunner, and more than likely going to get the nomination. This taken into account, doing so ostensibly to alert the American voter, it is no less than Republican bait and switch.
Everyday I wake up under the auspice that today will be the day the troglodyte majority of Americans who blindly support Bush and the Republican ideology will pull the wool off their heads, and say, "Whoa, do you really think i'm that stupid?". However, that never comes, and I might as well be looking forward to an original members Beatles reunion in my living room.
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&s toryID=3934621" title="http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&s toryID=3934621" target="_blank"http://reuters.com/newsArticl...
|
|
|
| |
| More bullying from Guantanomo Bay? you must be kidding. |
| 12.03.03 (10:23 am) [edit] |
The Guardian:
A team of military lawyers recruited to defend alleged terrorists held by the US at Guantanamo Bay was dismissed by the Pentagon after some of its members rebelled against the unfair way the trials have been designed, the Guardian has learned.
And some members of the new legal defence team remain deeply unhappy with the trials - known as "military commissions" - believing them to be slanted towards the prosecution and an affront to modern US military justice.
Of the more than 600 detainees at the US prison camp at Guantanamo, none has been charged with any crime, and none has had access to a lawyer, although some have been in captivity of one kind or another for two years.
But the US has repeatedly promised that at least some of the prisoners will be charged and tried by military commissions, an arcane form of tribunal based on long-disused models from the 1940s.
When charged, a prisoner will be assigned a uniformed military defence lawyer. The prisoners have a theoretical right to a civilian lawyer, but the US has placed financial and bureaucratic obstacles in the way of this.
A former military lawyer with good contacts in the US military legal establishment said that the first group of defence lawyers the Pentagon recruited for Guantanamo balked at the commission rules, which insist, among other restrictions, that the government be allowed to listen in to any conversations between attorney and client.
"There was a circular that went out to military lawyers in the early spring of 2003 which said 'we are looking for volunteers' for defence counsel," said the ex-military lawyer. "There was a selection process, and the people they selected were the right people, they had the right credentials, they were good lawyers.
"The first day, when they were being briefed on the dos and don'ts, at least a couple said: 'You can't impose these restrictions on us because we can't properly represent our clients.'
"When the group decided they weren't going to go along, they were relieved. They reported in the morning and got fired that afternoon."
The Pentagon's recently set up Office of Military Commissions denied the claim. "That is not true, never happened," said its spokesman, Major John Smith. "The military commission is a tool of justice. I expect some of these individuals [on Guantanamo] will plead not guilty, and will be represented zealously by their lawyers."
Yet the Guardian understands from a uniformed source with intimate knowledge of the mood among the current military defence team, six lawyers strong, that there is deep unhappiness about the commission set-up.
"It's like you took military justice, gave it to a prosecutor and said, 'modify it any way you want'," the source said. "The government would like to say we have done these commissions before. But what happened after [the Nazi cases] was the military justice system changed. What we have done is stupid. It is, I would say, an insult to the military, to the evolution of the military justice system. They want to take us back to 1942."
Two Britons, Moazzam Begg and Feroz Abassi, are among the Guantanamo prisoners that President George Bush has "designated" for trial. The military defence lawyers in Washington are still waiting for permission to fly to Guantanamo.
In an investigation into the Guantanamo prison camp, the Guardian has also learned that a number of prisoners, thought to be between two and five, are kept permanently isolated in a super-secure facility within the main prison camp at Guantanamo, Camp Delta.
|
|
|
| |
| Crazy watch locates Rumsfeld.... |
| 12.02.03 (8:31 pm) [edit] |
Defense(Offense) Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday that the notion of peril in Iraq is a contradiction, noting that "a limited number" of adversaries continued to kill or wound American and allied forces even as schools and hospitals open and the economy stabilized.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/02/internatio nal/europe/02RUMS.html" title="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/02/internatio nal/europe/02RUMS.html" target="_blank"http://www.nytimes.com/2003/1...
Those are my sentiments exactly when I see footage from Iraq these days, I think to myself, "What are these people carrying on about?, they couldn't possibly be perched any higher up on the hog".
He continues;
"There is no question but that there are periodic incidents where people are being killed and wounded — we know that.
Periodic? How soon we forget. Still clicking the heels of the highest casualty ridden month of the war of awesome, he's managed somehow to minimalize it to periodic. I guess since he spoke this on Dec. 1st, technically this month has coughed up little bloodshed.
But just because I'm not tired enough to sleep right now, doesn't mean I'm not sleeping tonight. I guess it could if I could just refine my doublespeak. But you get the analogy, you're smart, so enough said.
And boy, it's a good thing he reported that when he did, because another U.S. soldier was killed on Tuesday by a roadside bomb near the tense town of Samarra, the 189th to die in fighting since President Bush declared major combat over on May 1.
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyI D=3926742" title="http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyI D=3926742" target="_blank"http://reuters.com/newsArticl...
|
|
|
| |
| American Dollar, the Rial of the 21st century. |
| 12.02.03 (9:28 am) [edit] |
Today, reportedly, the Euro has climbed to a record high against the Dollar, even in the face of all this 'economic resurgence'.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml" title="http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml" target="_blank"http://www.reuters.com/newsAr...;jsessionid=ADDBQGGCRUN0Y CRBAEZSFFA?type=businessN ews&storyID=3924127
Citing market fears of further bomb attacks and a huge U.S. current account deficit, the Euro is trading at $1.2077.
Remembering of my trip to Europe in 2001, the Euro was worth .82 on the dollar, which made for a healthy exchange in German beer and chocolate.
Despite all the parading of a recovering economy, and a pat me on the back style of governance, the unemployment rate is still at an unhealthy 6%, or to quantify, 8.8 million.http://www.bls.gov/news.relea...
This, as high as it's been since 1991.
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs/esn/n26a.html" title="http://nces.ed.gov/pubs/esn/n26a.html" target="_blank"http://nces.ed.gov/pubs/esn/n...
Also nearly everyday you can pick up the Wall Street Jornal, or any paper for that matter and have a look at the market, and generally find it in the red. Even the Nasdaq, and it's tough to get blue chips to turn red, but nearly on a daily basis, it happens.
Jobs all over are getting tossed into G.W.'s trashbag of I don't care, yet are being replaced with no more than bigger breaks for bigger companies. I can't stress to you enough how Supply-side economics doesn't work, especially when you're being as fiscally negligent as this administration and Congress is.
The simple matter of fact is that during the 90's, it was hard not to get a good paying job, but these days, you'll find the college educated duking it out for some of the most remedial positions available. Just take a look out on the highways. When times are good, the highways are infested with 18 wheelers, carrying bought goods across the countryside, and this is also a very simple way to evaluate the economy. And today, not so many of these trucks are out and about.
|
|
|
| |
| A Nation divided. |
| 12.01.03 (7:59 am) [edit] |
Voters either adore or abhor Bush. This is the one factor that will determine next year's US election
Gary Younge
Monday December 1, 2003
The Guardian
Every weekday afternoon on CNN, a programme called Crossfire pits a Democrat commentator against a Republican. In what passes for debate, they raise topical issues in rapid succession and bellow over each other in an attempt to score cheap points and earn applause from the studio audience.
The overriding impression is one of mayhem, machismo, bluster and braggadocio. The aim is not to win anyone over but to shout them down. Those who clap do so not because they have been convinced but because their views have been confirmed. A few years ago this would have resembled little more than a device for a knockabout show on a channel with more airtime than news. But with the presidential election less than a year away, Crossfire is beginning to serve as a metaphor for the state of US political discourse.
A nation riven between those who adore President Bush and those who abhor him is in no mood for reasoned discussion. Having rallied around the flag after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and then again (though less so) when the troops went to war, people are now retreating to their political affiliations. And all the indications are that they intend to stay there until polling day. The presidential elections of 2004 will be decided not by who can sway the centre but rather who can shore up their base.
For every sign that some are desperate for regime change at home, there is proof that a similar number have undying faith in the president. In a recent Time/CNN poll, 47% said they were likely to vote for George Bush and 48% said they would not; 79% of Republicans said they believed he was a president you could trust, 75% of Democrats said they thought he wasn't; 68% of Democrats believed he had been "too quick to interject his own moral and religious beliefs into politics", 67% of Republicans believed he hadn't. Break down the response of almost any question along party lines and the nation appears irrevocably split - separate outlooks roughly equal in size.
"National unity was the initial response to the calamitous events of September 11 2001," argued the Pew Research Centre in a report, The 2004 Political Landscape: Evenly Divided and Increasingly Polarised. "But that spirit has dissolved amid rising political polarisation and anger. In fact, a year before the presidential election, American voters are once again seeing things largely through a partisan prism."
And what is true in the polls is reflected in popular culture. Dude, Where's My Country?, the latest book by the leftwing polemicist Michael Moore, may be No 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, but when it comes to children's toys, the George W Bush elite force aviator doll - a 12-inch figure of Bush in the military garb he wore on the USS Lincoln when he declared the war was over - has set a sales record for collectible action figures on the KB Toys website.
It is a far cry from Bush's inaugural speech, in the wake of Florida's vote-counting debacle three years ago, when he pledged to "work to build a single nation" and "seek a common good". Instead he has created divisions so deep that Americans take one look at him and, depending on their political persuasion, see two completely different people. Asked to describe Bush, Republicans were most likely to use the words "decisive", "determined" and "strong", while Democrats described him as "cocky", "arrogant" and "boneheaded".
This gulf is already having far-reaching political consequences. For if the two sides are evenly balanced, as it appears they will be, the election will be shaped as much by logistics as politics. There will be no equivalent to the Reagan Democrats or Clinton Republicans in this election - just voters who love Bush and voters who loathe him.
This explains the insurgent success of the former Vermont governor Howard Dean in the race for the Democrat presidential nomination. His anti-war stance and promise to reverse tax cuts were initially dismissed as alienating to swing voters. But as the political landscape becomes ever more polarised, the issue is not whether you can influence the doubters (who are dwindling) but whether you can energise the devout (who are growing).
Dean has benefited not just from the rage that Democrats harbour against Bush's excesses, but from the frustration at their own party's inability to effectively challenge them in Congress. In order to run against the president, he must first run against the Democrats' party establishment.
Bush faces a different dilemma. With the ban on partial-birth abortions, a hawkish foreign policy and extensive tax cuts, he has already motivated his base to vote for him. His primary desire now is to do as little as possible before election day to further antagonise the Democrats' traditional supporters, who might otherwise stay at home.
The Medicare bill, passed with much arm-twisting last week, was aimed not at helping the elderly (by and large it won't) but at neutralising an issue where the Democrats do well, relating to an electorally important group (the elderly) who lean towards the Democrats. Similarly, after backing a legal challenge to affirmative action in the supreme court, the White House has gone out of its way to look good to African-American voters. In June, the administration banned federal law enforcement officers from racial profiling in routine police work. A month later Bush went to Africa and branded slavery "one of the greatest crimes of history". He knows few black Americans will vote for him, but he hopes that, by appearing sensitive to their concerns, they will not vote against him.
For all the president's efforts, however, the Democrats are making almost all the headway. The increasing financial and human costs of the war in Iraq, and the state of the economy (a statistical recovery without jobs will not help the Republicans), have sent Bush's ratings into a four-month decline that shows few signs of reversing.
The trouble is, when it comes to logistics the Republicans win hands down. First, they have a candidate. The Democrats do not even have a clear frontrunner and will only get one after a bruising, costly, crowded battle likely to run at least into spring.
Second, the Republicans' most loyal supporters - the Christian right - are far better organised, motivated and ideologically cohesive than those of the Democrats - African-Americans. Since the war the Democrats have won only one election - 1964 - without needing black support.
Finally, and most importantly, the Republicans have far more money. The Democrats are talking about giving up on the South altogether (with the exception of Florida) because they can't afford to fight in a region where they are unlikely to win any states. Meanwhile, the Republicans have sufficient funds to talk about mounting a serious challenge in California - a state they have not won since 1988.
The good news for the Democrats is that the basic message, that Bush is doing the country more harm than good, is finally getting through. The bad news is that the next election will be decided less by who has the best message than who has the biggest megaphone, whether they know which direction to point it and whether anyone at the other end is listening. On all three counts, the Republicans are ahead.
|
|
|
| |
|
Cost of the War in Iraq
(JavaScript Error)
|
