May 2008 archive

They Served Their Country Honorably

Seven veterans under VA’s care commit suicide

They served their country honorably but after risking their life in combat abroad, coping with coming home was too much. In the last three months seven servicemen being treated by Spokane’s VA Hospital have committed suicide.

Comedy Central’s “Lil Bush” on McCain…

A vote for McCain is a vote for Bush…gotta love Comedy Central. 🙂



If the video doesn’t show up, click here to watch it on the Comedy Central site.



Enjoy.

Crossposted to ePluribus Media and DailyKos.

The Construction Phase

The snow has melted, though it did flurry a bit today, the horses decided to sleep in the sunshine this morning.  They picked a spot behind the barn and took a nap while I worked on some projects.  There is an old farm dump on the property that I started clearing out, I rented a dumpster and am quickly filling it up and work on a new rock retaining wall is about half way complete.

The builders showed up this weekend and helped to locate the new house site.  They are a fun-loving family from Vermont that gets along very well.  The father is the most talented carpenter but each son has his own talents as well.  We had lunch and discussed all of the various things to consider when building from scratch.  Luckily: the road into the site is good enough as is to allow for construction vehicles, the house has perfect southern alignment for maximum solar capacity, the spot is already cleared and just needs to be excavated, the tractor should make things easier during the build and they are going to allow me to help with the construction!

 

The Stars Hollow Gazette

Petty Egotistical Gob of Fat.

It appears that Timmeh has barred Arianna Huffington from NBC and MSNBC because she has some less than flattering things to say about him in her new book- Right Is Wrong: How The Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded The Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe.

Seems she called him “a conventional wisdom zombie”.

Now actually I think that Arianna’s “blog” is nothing more than a celebrity masturbation society and I’ve never forgiven her for her early fascism.  Kind of hard to get over the fact she was a Coulter/Ingram/Malkin clone without the bulimia and with an accent like a Gabor sister.

But I have to give her credit for this.  Way to stand up against the man sista!

Here is the coverage on her own site.  The video plays automatically- don’t say I didn’t warn you.

It’s a post by ZP Heller @ BraveNewFilms.org that is too short to quote extensively, but includes this gem-

If Huffington’s claim is true and Russert has been pulling rank with NBC, then this whole affair smacks of immature middle-school antics.  Is Russert really that sensitive that he can’t take criticism from Huffington?

Arianna’s latest is-

Shameful Days: Why Won’t The Media Pursue the Pentagon Propaganda Scandal?

The last ten days have been among the most shameful in the history of American journalism.

On April 20th, the New York Times published its expose of the Bush administration’s use of Pentagon-approved, prepped, and financially-enriched “military analysts” to appear on TV to help sell the invasion of Iraq, and then put a positive spin on the occupation — even as conditions on the ground deteriorated.

It was a powerful illustration of the Bush administration’s commitment to propaganda and disinformation. But it was also a damning indictment of the mainstream media’s complicity in the wholesale deception of the American public on the single most important decision a country can make — the decision to go to war.

Mission Accomplished!

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The Roots of Wright: Segregation and the Unfamiliar

This is a diary I posted on dkos yesterday.  I am pleased enough with it that I want to make it my first post here on docudharma.  Looking around the site and seeing who is posting here, I recognize a lot of names as people I respect from dkos and have seen a lot less of recently.  So I expect to be here more as a haven from the relentless Obama diaries.  Although this is technically an Obama essay concerning an absurd media “issue,” the point of this diary is to take a look at race, and to make explicit the racism behind the Rev. Wright controversy.  

(But one thing first:  because I can, I want to say right off the top that you have to be an idiot to blithely assume there is no chance that 9/11 was a conspiracy.  Ahhhh!  The smell of freedom.)  

Oh yeah, and thanks to pfiore8 for inviting me here.

So here goes nothing.  Please be kind.

Genius!

I’ve been on vacation since last Thursday and ’til Monday, so no serious blogging for me.  Well except for what follows:

“The chickens come home to roost” The Non-Reverend Wright Edition

A better searcher may be able to locate an earlier use of the term, but, as far as I can tell, it took less than 48-hours for the term to be used regarding 9.11.  In other words, ‘the crazy black guy’ didn’t make it up…  Sorry folks.  

Cornwall Standard Freeholder (Ontario)

September 13, 2001 Thursday

American policy abroad at root of terrorist acts

BYLINE: Harry Valentine, Standard-Freeholder

To the editor:

By now, most people reading this would have seen TV coverage of the jetliners being crashed into the World Trade Centre buildings in New York City. The magnitude of this event may not be easy to fathom.

These people represented the American economy and the Western way of life. Yet, in far away lands, America is despised. America is seen as the bully which intrudes into the domestic affairs of other nations.

America facilitates military coups, such as the one which brought Chile’s Pinochet to power and supported repressive dictators like a Philippine Marcos. America bombed innocent civilians in Vietnam and in Iraq. Millions of people abroad have suffered due to American intervention. The tragic spectacle which occurred in New York City happened to a lesser extent, but more often, in trouble lands overseas.

Now the chickens have come home to roost, right in the U.S.A. Innocent American civilians now struggle to comprehend the horror that has now been visited on their shores. Most are unaware of what their government has done abroad and over a period of many years.

Presently, it is unknown as to who orchestrated the horror in New York. The last time a building in the U.S.A. was bombed with a shocking loss of life, it was done by a former U.S. serviceman who was disgruntled over American governmental behaviour. Whoever was behind crashing the airplanes into the buildings evidently wanted to send a strong message of disapproval to Washington.

Hell, it was even the TITLE of this article:


Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

September 15, 2001 Saturday

Late Edition

America’s chickens come home to roost

BYLINE: ALAN RAMSEY

`BAA, bah Moscow/Your troops are in Kabul/You cannot have our athletes/But you can certainly have our wool.” Remember it? Maybe not. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and the Fraser government’s uncritical support, in an election year, for the Carter doctrine of US support for the Islamic mujahideen (“holy warriors”) guerilla groups, in their US proxy war against the Soviet-backed Afghan regime of Babrak Karmal, was a long time ago.

Twenty-two years later the Americans are reaping the consequences of a monster they helped create but could not control; and Australia, again, is “shoulder to shoulder” with Washington, just as Bob Hawke was in February 1991 when he went to war in the Gulf with the father, and now John Howard, in an election year, is pledging to go to war with the son.

It took almost TWO WEEKS for it to be used in The Washington Post:

The Washington Post

September 23, 2001 Sunday

Castro Warns About U.S. Military Plans;

Cuba’s President Says Fighting Could Lead to ‘Infinite Killing of Innocent People’

Kevin Sullivan, Washington Post Foreign Service

Fidel Castro  said today that the U.S. government was run by “extremists” and “hawks” whose military response to the Sept. 11 terror attacks in New York and Washington could turn into an “infinite killing of innocent people.”

“Their capacity to destroy and kill is enormous, but their traits of equanimity, serenity, reflection and caution are, on the other hand, minimal,” Castro said, addressing more than 50,000 flag-waving Cubans in this small tobacco-producing town 20 miles south of Havana.

“In the name of justice and under the strange title of ‘Infinite Justice,’ the tragedy should not be used to irresponsibly start a war that, in reality, could turn into an infinite killing of innocent people,” said Castro, whose government’s statements about the attacks have grown increasingly shrill.



Castro recited several passages from President Bush’s address to Congress on Thursday. He said Bush’s call to arms could turn into a “struggle against ghosts they don’t know where to find — if they exist or not — [and] whether those they will kill have any responsibility” in the terror attacks. In the “strange holy war that is about to start, it’s impossible to tell on which side there is more fanaticism,” he said.

….

In the wake of the terror attacks, as the Bush administration has shifted from grief to war planning, Cuba has shifted its emphasis from sympathy for the victims to condemnation of U.S. policy.

Recent government statements, believed to reflect Castro’s views, have said the “chickens have come home to roost” for a nation that has “for more than five decades promoted terrorism on an enormous scale across the globe.” Opinions on nightly television news “round-tables,” which largely promote the government line, have also grown increasingly sharp.


Seattle Weekly

October 11, 2001, Thursday

RELIGIOUS WAR?

BYLINE: nina shapiro

Robert Burrowes is a specialist on Yemen at the Jackson School of International Studies:


Yemen is illustrative of the extent to which most of what I call revolutionary political Islam, particularly in the last couple of decades, really is tied to Afghanistan. It was the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan that led to the call for militant Islamists to come to Pakistan, train, and then go fight in Afghanistan. And this was largely a CIA and Saudi conceived, designed, organized, funded project–it was a Cold War project.

What happens when the Cold War ends is that the U.S. and the Saudis end their support, and the chickens come home to roost. These Arabs, now called Afghani Arabs or Arab Afghanis, from Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia itself (like bin Laden), the Sudan, even from the Philippines, Indonesia–these people began to filter back. The Arabs from all these different countries, who by this time had become more militant Islamists, were a peer group. They had interacted with one another, and they had learned how to fight.

A significant portion came from Yemen, but a much larger group filtered back into the Arab world by way of Yemen because the government was so weak, the borders were so porous. This, I think, explains why you had in the mid-1990s militant Islamic activity.

United Press International

November 6, 2001, Tuesday



U.S., Saudi chickens come home to roost

By MARTIN SIEFF, Senior News Analyst

A specter is haunting the Bush administration and the ruling House of Saud in Saudi Arabia. It is that the hypocrisies, double standards and deliberate blind eyes that both governments have practiced for two decades may now be coming back to haunt them.

Saudi Arabia has been a major strategic partner of the United States ever since the mid-1950s, when it replaced Texas as the key “swing” oil producer for the whole world.

But the Washington-Riyadh partners did far more than that. Saudi Arabia also poured vast funds in Pakistan with Washington’s eager approval. And it also bankrolled the mujahedin, Muslim “warriors of God” that the United States supported in their fight against the invading Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan. And in 1986, when the Soviets appeared to have finally turned the tide against the Islamic mujahedin, the United States tipped the scales in their favor again by supplying them with limitless quantities of hand-held Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

In doing so, they taught the young rising generation of Muslim extremists, radicalized by their Saudi-funded schooling, that they could take on a superpower and beat it. Now the United States itself must face the consequences of that confidence in Afghanistan.

From America’s point of view, it all seemed to work so well. At least for two decades. But since the Sept. 11 slaughter of between 3,000 to 5,000 Americans in the World Trade Towers in New York City, American policymakers are nervously being forced to acknowledge the significance of other factors they have been only too happy to ignore over the past two decades.

The Bush administration has so far put no pressure on the Saudis over this and made no recriminations. On the contrary, as UPI Analysis and UPI Hears have reported on an ongoing basis, U.S. foreign policy since Sept. 11 has tilted dramatically in directions the Saudis wanted it to go. The Palestinians and the Pakistanis have been courted and Israel and India pressured intensely to refrain from retaliation against terrorist attacks from Islamic groups.

Whether it was indeed roosting chickens is a rather weighty subject since the consensus opinion is that the nineteen people in the jets are best explained away as irrational hateful aberrations…  They did it because they ‘hated our freedom’ and our ability to buy shit at Walmart, right?

Tomorrow we shall discuss what “God’s will” means, and how it isn’t and is about these roosting chickens…

Thought for the day: Failure accomplished

“Let me say that no one has supported President Bush on Iraq more than I have.”– John McCain.

Five years since Mission Accomplished.  3,920 American deaths since then — 97% of US fatalities.

While we debate whether Barack Obama was too harsh to Jeremiah Wright, the killing continues.

While Americans say the price of gasoline is a more important issue than the war in Iraq, the blood keeps flowing.

While House Democrats try to pass a bigger appropriation for the war than anyone has aked them for, the death toll mounts.

Four thousand US service deaths.  Thirty thousand wounded.  Countless thousands damaged for life.

Perhaps a million Iraqis dead.  We don’t even try to count.  Four million forced from their homes.

Lives and families destroyed, here and in Iraq.

And the beat goes on.

Why can’t we stop this war?

What is wrong with this country?

Don’t talk to me about race or bitterness or the media or the economy.

What is wrong with us as a people?

How can we let this continue in our name?

And how can we possibly be considering electing a candidate who still talks about “victory?”

I can’t write any more; I’m making myself despondent.

I’ll let MoveOn have the last word.

 

May 1, 2003: President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news…

Thank you all very much. Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. (Applause.) And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.

April 30, 2008

Fighting in Baghdad’s Shi’ite slum of Sadr City made April the deadliest month for Iraqi civilians since last August and for U.S. troops since last September, figures obtained on Wednesday showed.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters…

Democrats Work & Darcy Burner – Serving Well By Actually Serving

Somewhere along the line the pundits forgot that politics doesn’t begin and end in Washington, DC.  They focus on FOX News appearances and ABC debates and the words of a pastor, but they fail to look at how some of us are making appearances in our communities, finding solutions, and getting beyond words.  

With every campaign talking about change this year, let’s look some of the people who are changing the way they campaign.  Let’s look at people who aren’t just saying how they would act if they were elected, but are showing through their actions the very nature of their commitment and leadership.  

May Day! Iraq Dock Workers

May Day Message from the Port Workers in Iraq to West Coast dock workers in the U.S.

Dear Brothers and Sisters of ILWU in California

The courageous decision you made to carry out a strike on May Day to protest against the war and occupation of Iraq advances our struggle against occupation to bring a better future for us and for the rest of the world as well.

SNIP

Read The Rest at Link!

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