The president of the Republic of Georgia eats his tie on national television. BBC
$1.1 Billion Giveaway for the Republic of Georgia Announced: "The United States Supports The Recovery, Stability, And Continued Growth Of Georgia's Economy" The White House, Sept. 3, 2008
(Wash. DC) We're not talking about the great state of Georgia, which deserves everything it has coming to it and more. We're talking about the Republic of Georgia, a nation of 4.5 million people wedged between Russia and Turkey.
On Wednesday, September 3, the White House announced a comprehensive aid package valued at $1.1 billion dollars to help the Republic of Georgia recover from the whipping it took after it attacked Russian peace keeping forces in South Ossetia, a breakaway province of Georgia near the Russian border. That region experienced a major war in 1991 and varying tensions since.
Russian personnel were in Georgia as part of a multi-national peace keeping regime created by the United Nations and endorsed by the European Union in 2006.
The Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism released a study today that shows Bush administration officials gave out hundreds of false statements relating to the threat posed by Iraq between 2001 and 2003:
“The study concluded that the statements ‘were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.’
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel did not comment on the merits of the study Tuesday night but reiterated the administration's position that the world community viewed Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, as a threat."
I don’t know about you, but I’m so glad that investigative journalists are asking the tough questions and getting to the truth behind Bush’s rhetoric about justification for war in Iraq…four years too late.
When Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, he was in the midst of an anti-war, anti-poverty campaign that ostracized him from the mainstream. CNN.com features a pretty decent reminder about King's legacy, and how "I have a dream" has been manipulated to create an icon rather than a complex man.
One of the resolutions that got killed Saturday was the one that would have put a referendum on Iraq on the primary ballot. This was the second round in the fight to get the Iraq referendum on the ballot. The Iraq referendum resolution had already passed the Resolutions Committee at the last SDEC meeting a few months ago and it was even brought up to the full SDEC meeting back then. It would have passed the full SDEC then, but it was unnecessarily tabled at that earlier meeting because party leaders were ignorant of the Texas statute that allowed the SDEC to put referendums on the ballot. They had to go look up the statute after the meeting and then found out that the grassroots activists were right and the SDEC could put referendums on the ballot just by a vote of the SDEC. It is unbelievable that the party tabled the proposal on such a lame motion. The parliamentarian or the person chairing the meeting should have been aware of the rules and allowed a vote on the resolution. Such ignorance of the rules is a joke. We need to elect party leaders at the next convention who have a basic understanding of state laws pertaining to party business.
Thanks to the undemocratic refusal of party insiders to allow a vote, the resolution failed to pass a second time last weekend. So now there will be no referendum on Iraq on the Texas Democratic Party ballot. I wanted to find out what happened, so tonight I called a few people on the phone. Madeleine Dewar, a member of the SDEC and one of the official sponsors of the Vote Us Out of Iraq resolution, called the meeting a "disaster" and said that she had the thirty two votes needed to pass the resolution in advance of the meeting. Scott Cobb, who initiated the campaign, last summer to get the referendum on the ballot said: "In California, Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill that had passed the California legislature on Aug 31 to put a referendum on Iraq on the ballot in California. The Texas Democratic Party should be ashamed of itself for acting like Schwarzenegger and preventing a referendum on Iraq from being on the ballot." Read More »
Though it may not be much of a cinematic accomplishment (considering it was directed by Mike Nichols and features Philip Seymour Hoffman in a prominent role) Charlie Wilson's War makes a much needed statement about American foreign policy. Read More »
Via WIMN's Voices, Vogue has a photo story up that takes glamorizing war to the ultimate degree. It features models dressed in camo and sprawled across desert sand. Because going to war is hot. So hot.
Amid the recent comments by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner that the world should prepare for war with Iran if they produce nuclear weapons pervades an uneasy and growing tension between Islamic and non-Islamic governments. Not before the current US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have ceased, now France has begun demonizing Iran and drawing sides in preparation for a war with the nuclear ambitious Islamic state. How can the Western world set about a peaceful, diplomatic engagement with Iran if they constantly pigeon-hole them as the ultimate enemy set on an unalterable course to nuclear war? The answer is they can’t. The second that our rhetoric posits Iran as the newest nuclear enemy bent on their own path to war, any attempt at diplomacy is severely weakened leaving the West with few options short of war.
Without a question, this is another news item that will never be published in the Mainstream News Media, and as usual, RAW Story has published what is by far, the most explicit and damning assessment of President Bush ever published - and I agree completely with his take on the worst President the United States has ever had in office:
Former Reagan aide: ‘Brownshirt’ Bush among top ‘mass murderers of all time’
08/31/2007 @ 9:55 am Filed by Nick Juliano
President Bush’s apparent plans for a preemptive nuclear strike on Iran will only add to the civilian death toll as a result of US intervention that has placed the president “high on the list of mass murders of all time,” a former aide in President Ronald Reagan’s administration known for strident anti-Bush rhetoric said Friday.
“Bush is too self-righteous to see the dark humor in his denunciations of Iran for threatening ‘the security of nations everywhere’ and of the Iraqi resistance for ‘a vision that rejects tolerance, crushes all dissent, and justifies the murder of innocent men, women, and children in the pursuit of political power,’” writes Paul Craig Roberts, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury. “Those are precisely the words that most of the world applies to Bush and his Brownshirt administration.”
Roberts, who has emerged as a fierce critic of Bush’s war policies, accused the president of ignoring habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions, justifying torture and demonizing critics as anti-American.
“Bush … is responsible, according to Information Clearing House, for over one million deaths of Iraqi civilians, which puts Bush high on the list of mass murderers of all time,” Roberts writes in a column published Friday on antiwar.com. “The vast majority of ‘kills’ by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan are civilians.” MUCH MORE
Coming from a former Republican aide to Ronald Reagan, I’d say the above assessment of President Bush is damning enough to justify an immediate impeachment of this entire administration - not as a political weapon or for partisan gain, but to fulfill our responsibility as American citizens to at least attempt to save the many lives that now hang in the balance of Bush’s insane quest to attack Iran, as spelled-out further down in the article. One quote caught my attention, and in a nutshell, clearly spell-out the danger that Bush and Cheney pose to the United States and the world as a whole:
“Encouraged by the indifference of both the American media and Christian churches to the massive casualties inflicted on Iraqi civilians, the Bush administration will not be deterred by the prospect of its air attacks inflicting massive casualties on Iranian civilians. … Clearly, turning the Muslim Middle East into a wasteland is the Bush policy,” Roberts writes. “For Bush, civilian casualties are a non-issue. Hegemony uber alles.” (Emphasis added)
If you don’t believe this President is dangerous and poses the greatest national security risk the United States has ever faced, then you haven’t been listening and reading all of the evidence that our complicit Mainstream News Media refuses to publish - and as patriotic Americans, we should all DEMAND that the MSM quit publishing propaganda and “fluff” stories, and for a change, try telling the truth so we can awaken the rest of America and rid ourselves of who the Russians’ call “The Master of Disaster”!
This month has given us countless articles on how the "surge is working" and how so many Democratic politicians have gone to Iraq and have determined that progress is being made. I couldn't help but think, after reading many of these, that maybe I was wrong. Maybe adding security enforcements will do the trick, and set up stabilitiy for political reconciliation. The more I thought, however, it became abundantly clear that I need to have more confidence in my anti-war views. The strategy is fundamentally flawed, no matter how you spin day-to-day events in Iraq. No matter how secure one province or neighborhood is, another will just erupt with sectarian violence. At every point in this disastrous war, just like in Vietnam, talking heads have tried to convince us that the strategy is starting to work and that we just need to be patient. I think it is important for all of us to remember that the war was wrong when it started, its wrong now, and it will always be wrong. As cliche as it has become, there is no military solution. No security plan our brightest Generals could come up with will stop the sectarian violence. The political situation has gotten signficantly worse, and until we present the Iraqi government with real consequences, they will continue to be ineffective. Finally, I should say that all of us in the anti-war community need to come together. Unfortunately, many in Congress have failed us in the past. They voted for this war, they voted to continue funding it, and they have not done all that they can do oppose it. But now, we must leave the past behind, and keep the anti-war movement united around a common cause.
An in-depth front page article in the New York Times yesterday lays out clearly how the war in Iraq has compromised success in the war in Afghanistan and how the Bush Administration's policy has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
The article lays out that once President Bush shifted focus from Afghanistan, a country harboring Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization that actually attacked us on 9/11, to Iraq, a country that had nothing at all to do with 9/11 and was kept in check by UN sanctions, the situation in Afghanistan began to deteriorate.
Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, when I foolishly believed that this administration couldn’t do anything to even further neglect, abuse, and pretty much spit on the veterans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush went and one-upped me with a gem of statement given during a press conference today and covered by ABC News.
Bush spoke to the press this morning after meeting with the panel that he put together five months ago following the Walter Reed scandal, known as the President's Commission on Care for America's Returning Wounded Warriors and consisting of former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, former Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson (who resigned while working for this commission) and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. He commented on the recommendations the panel made regarding the improvements needed in the treatment veterans receive. Read More »
Jim Nicholson, Secretary of the Department of Veterans affairs (located just a few blocks down the street from Campus Progress), signed his resignation letter today. I know I just wrote a crib sheet on the history of veteran treatment in the U.S., but this news had to be highlighted. Every time another Bush appointee admits he’s not qualified for job he got just for being a friend of the administration (I’m looking at you Mike Brown), it’s newsworthy to me.
Are you like me? Are you still kicking yourself for missing out on Grand Old Party Friday night? If I had known I could have paid $70 to enjoy “a top-shelf bar” with “young Republicans between the ages of 21 and 35,” I would have been all up in that rocking my finest seersucker. To make up for missing out on GOPalooza’s night “to celebrate what’s right,” I snubbed Al Gore’s Live Earth concert Saturday to hit up a cookout in a house with four former White House interns. When I walked in the front door and saw two Young America’s Foundation posters – one with a glory shot of the president, the other with the phrase “I Love Capitalism” – I knew I had arrived.
The Defense Department has decided to make it impossible to reach 13 Web sites from its network, citing an overabundance of “recreational traffic.”
In the policy released today, General B.B. Bell, commander in South Korea, said use of those sites “impacts our official DoD network and bandwidth ability, while posing a significant operational security challenge.”
Among the restricted sites is Photobucket. I don't know about you, but all I ever see there are pictures of family gatherings and new babies. MySpace and YouTube are also banned, along with several other video sites. If they're really short on bandwidth, I can understand cutting YouTube, but c'mon folks. Let's not send our armed forces into conflict and cut them off from a common way of staying in touch with families and friends.
The President has now decided that he's "the commander guy." I don't know if this is an official military title. I don't know if Dick Cheney convinced him that it would sound dignified. I don't know if he just stayed up late watching Russell Crowe movies. But I do know that our President is an embarrassment.
Perhaps the wounds are still a bit too deep for me to bring this up - rest assured, I am not saying this as a political exploitation, using a tragedy to highlight a point; I am simply saying this to draw a comparison.
What happened at Virginia Tech is a heartbreaking tragedy, I will never, ever deny that. The time to grieve is now, and the nation will continue to grieve.
Consider this, however: at the time of this being written, 3311 Americans have died in Iraq, in addition to hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Unlike the war in Vietnam, Americans seem to be removed from this war. They seem to be going on with normalcy as Americans are losing their lives every day.
The truth is that the loss of lives at Virginia Tech isn't any more or less tragic than the lost of lives in Iraq. Those who have died in Iraq also had hopes and dreams, parents and loved ones, lovers and friends. It breaks my heart that we mourn the deaths of 32 Americans, but we turn a blind-eye to the thousands of other Americans, simply because we're so far removed from them.
It is my hope that, through the tragedy, we can realize that the loss of any human life to a needless cause should be a travesty, and should be mourned. Only then, I hope, can public perception of the war in Iraq be more negative. If an angry mob of right-doers could take Don Imus off the air, I hope such a mob can also end the war in Iraq.
The only thing, though, is that it seems almost classless for us to be speaking about this now -- at a time when there is still so much hurt going on and so much grieving still to be done.
But either we make the wounds deeper and make the American people see, or they'll become stoic again after the wounds have healed. Thoughts?
On Monday, April 23, Campus Progress and American University will join forces on the AU campus to show the screening of "The Ground Truth," to highlight the true costs of the war in Iraq.
It's also supported by the United Methodist Chaplaincy.
The idea is that if we highlight the truths about the war in Iraq, and its cost and effects, more people would take a stand on the war. This is an effective way to raise conciousness about the war, as well as mobilize and motivate student activists to act and takea a standa against the war.
The "Wear Some Black" campaign was started by Emily Willard at American University. The idea behind that is to wear a button that says, "Wear Some Black Until the Troops Are Back," (or any sort of black at all) as a way to get the conversations moving and started about the deep wounds of war, its fiscal and human tolls.
A great deal of other schools have jumped on board with this, to include Old Dominion University. While the College Democrats here are the leaders in putting this together, some College Republicans members have also shown interest in making this a bi-partisan campaign.
The vision for this is to reach across party lines and work toward a dialogue and open-and-honest discussion about the Iraq war. It is my hope that every school in America will be on board with this campaign. If such anti-war sentiments change America's visions in the '60s, such changes are also possible now.
Anyhow, you're invited to this event. If you're interested in "Wear Some Black" campaign, we also need you.
The link to the facebook invitation is below. If you don't have facebook, shoot its organizer, Emily Willard, an e-mail at emily.willard@american.edu
Please remember that Campus Progress' terms of use do not allow promoting or endorsing any particular political party or candidate for office. Posts or comments that do this will be deleted.
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