Tag: Republican

“I don’t care if we’re holding 15,000 innocent civilians! We’re winning the war!”

     

Brigadier General Janis R Karpinski:     “The secret here is getting these people released, and we’re holding innocent people out there. ”  

    And General Wodjakowski turned around and said to me ” I don’t care if we are holding 15,000 innocent civilians! We are winning the war! “

Cross-posted from dailykos.com

    That quote came from this 237 page official document which was released to the ACLU by a FOIA request. The actual quote by General Wodjakowski can be found on page 171.

    This document not only addresses the necessity and inability of our military to release detainees who were innocent and had no intelligence value at all, it touches upon the known abuse of innocent Iraqi citizens, as well as the over-crowded conditions within the detainees facilities.

    Rather than giving you my version of this document, I thought it would be more beneficial to allow you to read it for yourself and form your own opinion.

The Republican Spiral, Down, Down, Down

There has been talk of the Republican Party becoming a regional party without much in the way of influence in the national debate, but until recently the Dog did not take this very seriously. After all, ours is a two party system. The few times where a third party has popped to anything like viability in the last 100 years it is has coalesced around a single presidential candidate (the Bull Moss with TR and Ross Perot with the Reform Party being the best examples) they have never managed to gain significant numbers of elected officials in State Houses or Congress.  

“You Picked the Wrong Fight Burr, The Wrong Fight Indeed!!”

Rachel Maddow ‘SLAMS’ Republican North Carolina Senator Richard Burr because of his obstruction of confirming Tammy Duckworth to the Veterans Administrations

Geithner’s “power grab.”

Cross-posted from Passive Ranting.

Read about it here.

Here’s the summary:

The crisis surrounding the American International Group was a near-tragedy that underlines the need for broad new government authority to regulate or even take control of financial institutions other than banks, the government’s top fiscal officials told lawmakers on Tuesday.

Geithner claims that if this power existed back in September, current measures such as endless bailouts and seven-figure bonuses for mentally-questionable financial fuck-ups would not have happened.

Tell Senate Democrats to remove Joe LIEberman from chairmanship.

Thanks to Glenn Greenwald for providing the information on this action alert.

Republican-in-Spirit Joe LIEberman has supported Republican dictators and right-wing policies for some years now.  In 2006, after losing a primary election to challenger Ned Lamont, LIEberman told Connnecticut voters that their will was irrelevant; he would run for re-election as an independent.  Lamont made a series of missteps afterward, losing out to his extreme right-wing opponent in the general election.  Since then, LIEberman has sided with Republicans on virtually every policy issue and used his caucus status with Senate Democrats to force them to adopt his position on legislation favorable to his Republican masters.

Now that there is an undeniable Democratic majority in the Senate, that political party no longer needs to coddle him by letting him keep the chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.  According to Greenwald, president-elect Barack Obama is taking the official position of staying the hell out of Senate affairs.  This creates the opening we on the left require to pressure the Senate to dump LIEberman.

Call Your Senators NOW

Democratic Spine

Photobucket

Democratic Spine ©2008 Emily Duffy Photo by Sibila Savage

Dimensions: 14″ x 14″ x 9″

Description: A mini coffin with a truncated human spine lays in a bed of velvet. The coffin is covered with quotes by Progressive, Democrats both recent and from history.

Materials: Wood, parchment reproductions of the Bill of Rights, burgundy velvet, metal hardware, paper, amber varnish.

Cross-Posted on my BLOG (where you can see larger images) and at DailyKos.

They Better Hope We Don’t Wake Up

“Bullshit is the glue that binds us as a nation.”

George Carlin

$700-Billion-assholes

Coup de Grace

Coup de grace is French for blow of grace.  It refers to the hunter’s final shot to the head – the grace being the end of suffering for the unlucky prey.   In this case, it is we, the American people who are the ill-fated quarry.  We are like the mouse that the cat is now tired of playing with.  We will soon hear the crunching of tiny bones.

Verbal Ju-Jitsu: Fight Elitists with… Ignorance

Getting Started

Barack Obama said something today that I think is beautiful from a framing perspective:

I mean it’s like these guys take pride in ignorance! It’s like they like being ignorant.

(hat tip to ruff4life at the Great Orange Satan)

I believe this is the counter frame to the Elitist Democrat.

Nobody wants to be ignorant, and depending on leaders who are proud of their ignorance and demand ignorance from their followers cannot be good for the running of a country.

Ignorance is simply not good public policy.

Perverts and Sadists.

I’m sorry, the language may get a little rough.

Appeasing Republicans

Corporatist War Monger President George W. Bush, in a pathetically desperate attempt to use an International speech to smear his domestic Democratic opposition as appeasers, quoted a Republican Senator as an example of American appeasement of Hitler prior to World War II.

While delivering an address before the Israeli parliament commemorating the 60th anniversary of Israel, President Bush said that Sen. Barack Obama and Democrats favor a policy of appeasement toward terrorists. CNN reports that Bush was comparing Obama to “other U.S. leaders back in the run-up to World War II who appeased the Nazis.”

In his speech, Bush said, “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

The Senator whom Bush quoted verbatim was Idaho Republican William Edgar Borah:

From 1924 to 1933 [Borah] was chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, and his major interest was in foreign policy…. An advocate of disarmament and the outlawing of war, he suggested the Washington Conference of 1921-22 and promoted the Kellogg-Briand Pact; in 1939 he fought revision of the Neutrality Act.

Of course Borah was far from the only ‘appeasing’ Republican. Indeed, prior to WWII, the Grand Old Party was home to many of the fiercest advocates of appeasement.

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