As disinterested as I am in the Presidential races at this point, I do have to get behind this sentiment right here, printed in Time magazine. John Edwards and Barack Obama have both been impressive, but the media’s take on Edwards in particular has been lazy, low-brow and tone deaf in terms of how his message lines up with what Americans are concerned about these days. For the sake of his un-minced words regarding health care and taxes, I’m more impressed with Edwards than any other candidate at this point.
Another challenge is that much of the attention he’s gotten recently has been the unflattering kind, stories that question his sincerity and assail his image as a fighter for the little guy by focusing on his pricey haircuts, huge house and hedge-fund job. These viral attacks, spreading from the Drudge Report and other blogs to newspapers everywhere, make a dumb argument. They assume that someone who’s wealthy can’t be a sincere advocate for poor and working people. By that logic, the healthy can’t speak on behalf of the sick, or whites on behalf of people of color (Al’s comment: Unless they’re a Republican). But in politics, of course, dumb arguments can hurt you, which is why some Edwards aides urged him not to build such a big house. Their effort failed because the Edwardses—having battled cancer and lost a son, Wade, in an automobile accident 11 years ago, when he was 16—wanted to enjoy the luxuries they could afford. “We live our lives,” says Elizabeth. “We’re not pretending to be anything we’re not. People have said, Don’t do this or that. How would it look? But I honestly don’t know how much time I’ve got. So we’re going to live our lives.”
Here’s what would truly be hypocritical: if Edwards spoke out on behalf of the disadvantaged while pushing policies that benefit the rich. This he does not do. He favors boosting the capital-gains tax rate for families earning over $250,000 and closing the loophole that allows fund managers—like those at Fortress Investment Group, where he earned almost $500,000 in 2006—to get taxed at just 15%. “He wants to take money away from the people who paid him,” says deputy campaign manager Jonathan Prince. “That’s not hypocrisy. That’s sincerity.”
I don’t know if any of you have been following this story, but with the resignations of Gonzo and Turd Blossom this past week, I’ve got a sense that this man is at the center of why they’re suddenly gone. Don Siegelman was formerly the governor of Alabama, as well as the Attorney General, and a number of other high-level political posts in over 20 years of public service in the state. The election in 2002 was one of those good-ol-boys (win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat) style victories for his opponent, as the night of the election, after polls closed and the election officials had gone home, Republicans busted into one precint and conveniently discovered a ”computer glitch” that swung 6000 more votes to their side, thereby securing the election. Siegelman fought it as best he could, but eventually conceded the election.
A little while later, a campaign manager for his opponent mentioned to his staff that “Karl had assured me” Siegelman would be taken down, and that “his girls would take care of him”. One of those girls was his wife, who happened to be a US Attorney. The subsequent arrest, perpwalk, trial, conviction…the whole thing has stunk since day one, and it really exposes what the real issue is here in the US Atty scandal, that it’s not really about those who were fired as much as it’s about who wasn’t fired. I highlighted the exploits of US Atty Steve Biskupic here a couple months ago in his pre-election prosecution of a woman named Georgia Thompson. This Siegelman case is another example of what happened there, only on a much larger scale.
Keep your eyes peeled for news regarding this story right here, because not only is it getting goofier by day, it may just be the “crime” we’ve all been waiting for.
Do Republicans keep electing these clowns so the rest of us will have something to laugh at?
Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was arrested in June at a Minnesota airport by a plainclothes police officer investigating lewd conduct complaints in a men’s public restroom, according to an arrest report obtained by Roll Call Monday afternoon. Craig’s arrest occurred just after noon on June 11 at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. On Aug. 8, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct in the Hennepin County District Court. He paid more than $500 in fines and fees, and a 10-day jail sentence was stayed. He also was given one year of probation with the court that began on Aug. 8. A spokesman for Craig described the incident as a “he said/he said misunderstanding,” and said the office would release a fuller statement later Monday afternoon. After he was arrested, Craig, who is married, was taken to the Airport Police Operations Center to be interviewed about the lewd conduct incident, according to the police report. At one point during the interview, Craig handed the plainclothes sergeant who arrested him a business card that identified him as a U.S. Senator and said, “What do you think about that?” the report states. (Raw Story)
Posted by John Rove as Politics, Words at 8:28 PM MDT
MSN is reporting that attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, is going to resign effective September 17Th. This is on the heels of the resignation of Karl Rove another man who seemed to be an integral part of the Bush Machine. My first reaction was that they were trying to get away from the train wreck that is the Bush presidency, after all who wants to be part of an administration that lost a war to Iraq. When you think about it a little more closely neither of these guys seem to have enough self awareness to know when they should be embarrassed(I am sure everyone has seen the video of Rove trying to rap) so why did they resign?
My guess would be that it is much easier to plead the 5Th when you no longer work for the government, and that is what we are probably going to see when these two testify before congress, regarding the US attorney firings. Improperly firing a bunch of republican appointees who know the law was probably a bad idea. The main reason these attorneys were fired seems to be that they refused to file bogus voter fraud charges in the 2006 elections and thus certain people (specifically Rove and Gonzales, and probably Bush) blamed them for the republican losses in 2006. I am not an attorney, but I would guess trying to use the justice department to influence elections is probably a crime, and Rove and Gonzales might be wise to concentrate on their legal defense and leave screwing up the country to other guys.
Updat from CNN:
Schumer and several congressional Democrats have asked for a special counsel to investigate Gonzales’ involvement in what has been charged to be the politically motivated firings of several U.S. attorneys and a controversial government no-warrant wiretapping program.
Senior Justice Department officials say Gonzales’ resignation is not expected to affect the scope or pace of an ongoing internal investigation into the firing of the U.S. attorneys and other issues.
“Alberto Gonzales was never the right man for this job,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Monday. “He lacked independence, he lacked judgment, and he lacked the spine to say no to Karl Rove.” Rove, another longtime Bush official and his top political adviser, also resigned this month.
“This resignation is not the end of the story,” Reid warned. “Congress must get to the bottom of this mess and follow the facts where they lead, into the White House.” In a statement, Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont said Gonzales was responsible for a “severe crisis of leadership that allowed our justice system to be corrupted by political influence.”
Leahy called the experience “a lesson to those in the future who hold these high offices, so that law enforcement is never subverted in this way again.”
Seems like a lot of military types are not feeling the surge. The real test will be whether decision makers in the Bush administration listen to people with experience or continue to weaken the US military by pursuing the Iraq debacle
(LATimes-8/24/07) WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is expected to advise President Bush to reduce the U.S. force in Iraq next year by almost half, potentially creating a rift with top White House officials and other military commanders over the course of the war.
Administration and military officials say Marine Gen. Peter Pace is likely to convey concerns by the Joint Chiefs that keeping well in excess of 100,000 troops in Iraq through 2008 will severely strain the military. This assessment could collide with one being prepared by the U.S. commander in Iraq, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, calling for the U.S. to maintain higher troop levels for 2008 and beyond.
Usually I make fun of wingnuts when they blame the teachers unions for all of societies ills but things like this make me think they have a point:
MESA, Ariz. (AP) — School officials suspended a 13-year-old boy for sketching what looked like a gun, saying the action posed a threat to his classmates.The boy’s parents said the drawing was a harmless doodle and school officials overreacted. “The school made him feel like he committed a crime. They are doing more damage than good,” said the boy’s mother, Paula Mosteller. The drawing did not show blood, bullets, injuries or target any human, the parents said. And the East Valley Tribune reported that the boy said he didn’t intend for the picture to be a threat. Administrators of Payne Junior High in nearby Chandler suspended the boy on Monday for five days but later reduced it to three days.
The security situation is improved on each piece of ground directly beneath our soldiers’ feet. Put these soldiers in vehicles, and the IED explosions argue against this theory. Our forces exit an area, and what happens then? The security situation reverts back to what it was prior to our surge of bodies into it. Insurgents, as often as they may incorrectly be described as puppets under the control of outside forces, are the Iraqis themselves. An obviously illegitimate, and hastily established national government has for the most part dissolved, while one level down, back-to-back assassinations of regional governors signal a grim reality, that the political situation will have to be built from the bottom up to exist with any authority or legitimacy.
Iraq’s Prime Minister has visited Iran, and has invited the Iranian President to Iraq. Just as we supplied arms to both sides in the Iran-Iraq war, and to Afghani insurgents in their fight against a Soviet occupying force, other nations in the world are doing the exact same thing, as the oil siphoned off and stolen each month since the invasion by insurgents provides ample trade value for whatever is needed. The events in Iraq are driving the situation, regardless of US policy. We are simply along for the ride at this point. In the year 2007 Iraq has destabilized politically, with both Sunni and al-Sadr’s Shiite blocs essentially pulling out of the federal government altogether, thereby rendering every single piece of legislation needing to be passed an impossibility.
This will never get better for us. On our account the Iraqis will not do a single thing from now until we finally leave. An intellectually dishonest attempt by someone, to trump up the significance of peace in a neighborhood or city that our troops currently have on lock-down, is the only example I’ve heard over the past several weeks to explain why we are now on a path towards victory. “The surge is working”, they say. In Baghdad? In any areas where our troops are not currently a presence, is there peace and safety in Iraq today? There is not. Students of history, military history especially, must recognize our position in Iraq today, and realize it is an exact replica of the French occupations of Vietnam and Algeria, as well as our own occupation of Vietnam. Anyone who doesn’t at this point is choosing faith over reason, and in time, will find themselves on the wrong side of history. Perhaps even then, arguing against something as certain as gravity.
Long ago I gave up chasing stories and providing timely coverage of anything, and that’s mostly because I’ve never really trusted my gut reaction to things, having lived long enough to know that an emotional reaction may make for good writing, but the tradeoff is being wrong about something in the story. This mine collapse in Utah, with the video and print my research led me to, was one of those cases where I was dying to post last week, but something didn’t seem right. There’s this CEO of Murray Energy, Bob Murray, whose coming at you with both barrells blazing, and in spite of the obvious faults this man is burdened with as a leader - anti-worker’s rights, paranoia, slow brain, inability to shut up - it would be an argument from now until the end of time, never to be settled for everyone involved, that the collapse was due to an earthquake. Whoever is saying it’s not from an earthquake is only interested in telling lies so they can unionize his opperation and by doing so, make electricity too expensive for poor old ladies on fixed incomes to afford.
Why jump into that mess when the lines are already drawn and bound to remain permanent? Why waste time arguing against the “it’s a dangerous job” mindset? Been there, done that (”The Mine Caved - 1/5/06“). Pointless…UNLESS, the mine collapses again, killing three rescue workers, and this time there’s no earthquake or lightning bolt to blame! Now let’s get to the good stuff:
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney: “We’ve got six coal miners trapped beneath more than 1,500 feet of Utah coal and rock, three brave men who struggled to rescue them are dead and six more are injured. And it’s not because of an act of God. It’s because of the acts of man. -
On April 4, 2007, Neil Cavuto of Fox Opinion, interviewed that man, Robert “Bob” Murray, a big contributor to the GOP. “He’s given the royal treatment by an admiring, jovial Cavuto, who was only too happy to allow his guest carte blanche to say nasty things about environmentalists, Al Gore and the “people” who are out to destroy the coal industry. FOX News continues to handle Murray with kid gloves, painting him sympathetically as the fatherly mine owner concerned only with the well-being of his workers.” (”YouTubeDescription”)
Cutting this guy some slack is the job of Fox Opinion, and they do it well. Here’s a clip of Murray and that paranoia I was mentioning above, as well as a few more of those shortcomings I highlighted:
All in all, the positive force of karma at play here is enough to make an athiest think for a moment that there actually is a God…a very angry God.
Buddhika Jayamaha is an Army specialist. Wesley D. Smith is a sergeant. Jeremy Roebuck is a sergeant. Omar Mora is a sergeant. Edward Sandmeier is a sergeant. Yance T. Gray is a staff sergeant. Jeremy A. Murphy is a staff sergeant.
VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)
The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense.
A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.
As many grunts will tell you, this is a near-routine event. Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Al Swearengen as Military at 4:16 AM MDT
Another challenge is that much of the attention he’s gotten recently has been the unflattering kind, stories that question his sincerity and assail his image as a fighter for the little guy by focusing on his pricey haircuts, huge house and hedge-fund job. These viral attacks, spreading from the Drudge Report and other blogs to newspapers everywhere, make a dumb argument. They assume that someone who’s wealthy can’t be a sincere advocate for poor and working people. By that logic, the healthy can’t speak on behalf of the sick, or whites on behalf of people of color (Al’s comment: Unless they’re a Republican). But in politics, of course, dumb arguments can hurt you, which is why some Edwards aides urged him not to build such a big house. Their effort failed because the Edwardses—having battled cancer and lost a son, Wade, in an automobile accident 11 years ago, when he was 16—wanted to enjoy the luxuries they could afford. “We live our lives,” says Elizabeth. “We’re not pretending to be anything we’re not. People have said, Don’t do this or that. How would it look? But I honestly don’t know how much time I’ve got. So we’re going to live our lives.”
