Monday, January 12, 2009

Headlines - Monday

Gideon Levy in Ha'aretz provides another example of how the US in Iraq and Israel in Gaza continue to humiliate themselves.
 
Of all the rotten luck, all the disasters now occurring in Gaza are manmade — by us. Aid cannot be offered with bloodstained hands. Compassion cannot sprout from brutality.
 
Yet there are some who still want it both ways. To kill and destroy indiscriminately and also to come out looking good, with a clean conscience. To go ahead with war crimes without any sense of the heavy guilt that should accompany them. It takes some nerve. Anyone who justifies this war also justifies all its crimes. Anyone who preaches for this war and believes in the justness of the mass killing it is inflicting has no right whatsoever to speak about morality and humaneness. There is no such thing as simultaneously killing and nurturing. This attitude is a faithful representation of the basic, twofold Israeli sentiment that has been with us forever: To commit any wrong, but to feel pure in our own eyes. To kill, demolish, starve, imprison and humiliate — and be right, not to mention righteous. The righteous warmongers will not be able to allow themselves these luxuries.
 
Anyone who justifies this war also justifies all its crimes. Anyone who sees it as a defensive war must bear the moral responsibility for its consequences. Anyone who now encourages the politicians and the army to continue will also have to bear the mark of Cain that will be branded on his forehead after the war. All those who support the war also support the horror.
 
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This story isn't from The Onion or a Saturday Night Live skit. It's for real. WTF???

Two national banking organizations — the American Bankers Association and the Financial Services Roundtable — are having a tantrum because some of their $700 billion bailout package might actually go to regular people so they can keep their homes.

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Jesus Christ, crusher of testicles?

...or The Boundless Hypocrisy Of The Christian Right

The Bible is a big book, so I've been having a hard time finding the passage in which Jesus commanded his followers to torture their enemies. Here's what he said in the Sermon on the Mount:

You have heard that it was said, "Love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

That doesn't seem to be an argument for torture, unless Jesus meant that we should "love" our enemies in the sadomasochistic sense.
 
I'm no Bible scholar, so in moments of doubt and uncertainty like this one, I like to appeal to authority. Luckily, man of God David R. Stokes, pastor of the Fair Oaks Church in Fairfax, Virginia, has a column today at TownHall.com, that bastion of conservatism that nurtures such towering intellects as Chuck Norris, in which he reassures the faithful that Jesus does indeed sanction torture: 
 
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Barack Obama is the Devil and he is "evil as hell" - so says Pastor Anderson, filled with the spirit of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ: 
 
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This restraint, however, depends on Israel not directly attacking Iran. William Lind argues that if Binyamin Netanyahu of the Likud Party gets elected on Feb. 10, he may well bomb Iran. In that case, Lind says, Iran might well have the tools to cut the US military off from its supplies that come up from the Persian Gulf through the Shiite south of Iraq, allowing it to be effectively killed.
 
Meanwhile, Israel continues its assault on Gaza alone, where the death toll is approaching 900: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=98950
 
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Separation of church and mate
 
Former church director of finances, William Jeremiah, has been arrested for theft and fraud after $276,000 went missing from the Lakeview Wesleyan Church in Marion, Indiana. Prosecutors allege that some of the money went for a church-subsidized vasectomy.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28546806/
 
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The morally repulsive son has a morally repulsive father
 
From a report on today's Fox News interview of George Bush the Elder and Younger:

The president's father said political invective has "gotten worse" since his days in the White House, adding: "It's offensive, very offensive."

The younger Bush agreed. "The biggest disappointment in the political process, that's been this kind of bitterness by a few people to the point where they don't want to have a logical discussion or a civil discussion about policy," he said. "They just want to tear you down."

Bush Jr. has, under Rove's tutelage, learned to leave the verbal bomb-throwing to the help, but it's just lovely to be lectured on civility by Bush Sr., who high-mindedly
said of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, "My dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos."

 
Also in the same interview, George "We do not torture" Bush admitted that he personally authorized the torture of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. - think progress - and that waterboarding is still necessary.
 
And in an interview with Wolf Blitzer the same day, Cheney defended waterboarding too: http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/late-edition-cheney-defends-waterboar
 
 
Thankfully, Barack Obama is not really interested in prosecuting the Bushies for anything, and just wants to move forward.
 
He says that he doesn't want CIA employees to "suddenly feel like they've got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering."
 
He did not specifically rule out a special prosecutor, saying, "That doesn't mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law."
 
Whatever that means.
 
 
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That's President George W. Bush, looking nervous while surrounded by children's books yesterday at an elementary school in Philadelphia.

Why does he seem so worried? Is he praying that there's no sequel to My Pet Goat that they'll ask him to read to the kids? Things ended badly last time, if you'll recall. Does he think he's in a dream? Deja-vu? Or is it just a general anxiety that afflicts him?

Or is he just thinking, like the rest of us, "Less than two weeks, less than two weeks, how much can I screw things up in less than two weeks?" Maybe the real issue is whether that question is, for him, a hope or a fear.
 
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Bernie and Bush - both made-off with beau coup bucks in ponzi schemes.
 
Three days after the world learned that $50 billion may have disappeared in Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme, the Times led its front page of Dec. 14 with the revelation of another $50 billion rip-off. This time the vanished loot belonged to American taxpayers. That was our collective contribution to the $117 billion spent (as of mid-2008) on Iraq reconstruction — a sinkhole of corruption, cronyism, incompetence and outright theft that epitomized Bush management at home and abroad. - frank rich in the nytimes
 
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Pedro Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, wrote in the the Vatican newspaper that "We have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution caused by the pill."
 
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The Buffalo Beast is out with their list of the 50 Most Loathsome People of 2008: http://www.buffalobeast.com/134/50mostloathsome2008.html
 
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Thomas Friedman, the consummate Villager, demonstrated yesterday on ABC This Week, just how readily Republican talking points become Conventional Wisdom in their hands:

Friedman: There are many terrible handoffs the Bush administration, many many, uh, are leaving for President Obama. But there is one overriding large one -- there has been no terrorist act in this country since 9/11. And I think that is a very sobering, weighty handoff for this administration.

Stephanopoulos: The number one priority is to keep the country safe.

Friedman: And I think that's where the debate's gonna have to be. Where I think the administration, the last one, really faulted itself was not consulting Congress. But the fact is, you know, the American people don't want to lose that. And I think that how Obama handles that -- I think that's going to be one of the toughest, toughest challenges going forward.

OK, let's have that debate. But it can't just be on Village terms. Because there are three components of this "weighty handoff" that go unmentioned by Friedman:

1. Bush also laid the groundwork for future terrorist attacks. The 2006 National Intelligence Estimate, after all, warned that the invasion of Iraq and subsequent Bush policies -- including the use of torture -- have in fact made the likelihood of future terrorist attacks exponentially greater.

2. Bush didn't keep us safe before 9/11. The historical record is clear that prior to that event, Bush dismissed counterterror concerns as a "Clinton thing," and he was clearly asleep at the wheel on the day it occurred. Any president who allowed the worst terrorist attack on American soil on his watch has no business subsequently claiming that he kept the country safe. (Also worth noting: The lack of any international terrorist attack in the intervening years is not evidence that Bush's post-9/11 strategy actually prevented anything.)

3. There in fact have been other terrorist attacks since 9/11. The most noteworthy of these was the October-November 2001 anthrax attacks, which killed five people, and has still gone unsolved. There have also been planned attacks nipped in the bud: a planned cyanide bombing, a man who intended to blow up LA banks, a former Army Ranger who planned to bomb abortion clinics, and the Alabama militiamen who intended to go on an anti-Latino killing rampage. There have been a number of lower-level acts of terrorism that reached fruition as well, ranging from rampaging gunmen in Knoxville, Tenn., and Moscow, Idaho, to a conservative wingnut who was sending out hoax anthrax letters.

All of these cases underscore the fact that domestic terrorism is almost completely off the Bush administration's radar -- except, of course, for those "eco-terrorists." What the "war on terror" we've gotten from Bush has amounted has been little more than a political marketing campaign.

Until we mount a serious campaign against terrorism that recognizes it for the global beast that it is -- one perfectly capable of emanating from our own soil -- we won't be doing anything to effectively halt the forces that actually breed terrorism.

And what George W. Bush's post-9/11 "war on terror" has done has actually harm our ability to do that for many years to come. He may not have suffered any further attacks, but that does not mean he kept us safe, now or in the future.

And this:

bushbubblepng

nctcdeaths3dpng

If global terrorism has increased under Bush's watch, how exactly did he keep us safe? Just because there hasn't been another major terrorist attack doesn't mean there won't be one, and Bush's will leave behind a world with far more terrorism than there was when he took office.  Even if a major terrorist attack occurs under the Obama administration, the roots of such an attack will be in the growth of global terrorism that occurred under Bush.

So we haven't been attacked, but the likelihood we will be attacked is higher than ever.  If this is the best thing George W. Bush and his supporters can take away from the past eight years, he truly has left us all with a legacy of ashes.

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Were oil prices manipulated by the speculators? Gee, what do YOU think?

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Joe the Plumber, who is currently in Israel reporting on the war, says journalists shouldn't be allowed to report on wars: http://thinkprogress.org/2009/01/11/joe-plumber-media/

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Fun fact: some of the land up for grabs by oilmen was selling for as little as $2.25 an acre.
 
Senate boosts wilderness protection across US: - h/t Dick
 
The 12 that were against protecting wilderness were all Repiglicans:
 
Brownback (R-KS)
Coburn (R-OK)
Corker (R-TN)
DeMint (R-SC)
Grassley (R-IA)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Johanns (R-NE)
McCain (R-AZ)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Thune (R-SD)

And the 20 that couldn't be bothered to vote were mostly Repiglicans as well (except for Biden, who's not in the country, Kennedy who has a brain tumor, and I don't know what Brown's excuse is):
Alexander (R-TN)
Biden (D-DE)
Bond (R-MO)
Brown (D-OH)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burr (R-NC)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Ensign (R-NV)
Graham (R-SC)
Gregg (R-NH)
Hutchison (R-TX)
Kennedy (D-MA)
Kyl (R-AZ)
Martinez (R-FL)
McConnell (R-KY)
Roberts (R-KS)
Specter (R-PA)
Vitter (R-LA)
Voinovich (R-OH)
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4,225 soldiers killed in Iraq; 637 in Afghanistan.
 
Iraq
Per Month - $10.3 billion
Per Week - $2.4 billion
Per Day - $343 million
Per Hour - $14 million
Per Minute - $238,425
Per Second - $3,973
Afghanistan
Per Month- $2 billion
Per Week - $469 million
Per Day - $67 million
Per Hour - $2.8 million
Per Minute - $46,296
Per Second - $771

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Chimpy is giving his last press conference this morning in a roomful of his enablers. Wonkette is live-blogging it: http://wonkette.com/405375/liveblogging-george-w-bushs-last-press-conference-ever
 
 
 

 


 

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