July 2008 archive

A kind of political air freshener seems to have dulled the nostrils of some progressives. Either that or for them the aroma of the festering lesion anchored in the executive branch and fed by tendrils deep in the muck of Congress on both sides of the aisle has abated. The odor of Constitution-dismantling legislation and executive orders, the rendition and detention and torture and murder associated with the “war on terror,” the spying on citizens, and the all-round knavery magically seems to have transformed itself into a bowl of pot pourri.    

Made insensate by this, some progressives say that, come January, if the man behind the desk in the Oval Office is Barack Obama, we should forget about eight years’ of doings by George W. Bush, Richard Bruce Cheney, Condoleeza Rice and their cabal. Establish a committee along the lines of the 1975-76 Frank Church Committee as the ACLU and others have suggested? Nah. Waste of time. Just like impeachment. A diversion of attention from crucial issues when our nation is hurting and there is so much important stuff to accomplish: energy, health care, getting out of Iraq.

In the interest, therefore, of moving forward on what’s essential, their reasoning goes: “Let bygones be bygones.”

What’s the point of talking about investigating next year anyway since Mister Bush will probably pardon these guys five minutes before he leaves office? Just be glad they’ll be out of our hair even if that means they’re off the hook. Leave them to their conspicuous consumption and other plutocratic games. The future is what matters. Move on.

Ugh.

1. Two weeks without news and, yet, the news doesn’t change. The LA Times reports Bombings in Baghdad and Kirkuk kill 57. “Violence killed 57 people and left another 280 wounded as a militant blew himself up at a Kurdish demonstration in the ethnically-mixed city of Kirkuk and three female suicide bombers targeted Shiite pilgrims marching in Baghdad.”

   The NY Times described the attacks as “one of the bloodiest sequences of attacks in Iraq this year”. In Baghdad, the three female bombers were “apparently using their flowing black robes, known as abayas, to carry explosives past checkpoints and the Iraqi policemen”.

   While the Washington Post adds that “in Kirkuk, the tensions have arisen over a power-sharing arrangement in a draft provincial elections law that would allocate Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens equal number of seats in the governing council of Tamim province, of which Kirkuk is the capital. But the Kurds were opposed to such a distribution, as well as an item in the legislation that called for a secret ballot to decide the power-sharing arrangement. After the Kurdish lawmakers walked out Tuesday, the parliament passed the bill.”

2. Bloomberg reports the U.S. deficit to reach record $490 billion in 2009. That’s only $83 billion more than Bush said in February when he forecasted the deficit to be $407 billion.

   The shortfall reflects a deterioration of the budget over the past seven years. Bush inherited a budget surplus of $128 billion when he took office in 2001. The budget worsened almost immediately, because of recession, the Sept. 11 attacks, the beginning of the war in Afghanistan and, later, the war in Iraq that began in March 2003.

   Bush recorded his first deficit a year after being sworn in, and it widened to the current record of $413 billion in 2004.

   Five months ago, the administration projected a shortfall of more than $400 billion this year and next, reflecting a struggling economy, and forecast a recovery to a $160 billion deficit in 2010, declining to $96 billion in 2011 and finally a $48 billion surplus in 2012…

   The current projections may understate the deficit next year because the administration hasn’t requested money to prosecute the wars for the full year, leaving that to the next president. Military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan now are costing about $10 billion to $12 billion a month.

   And where did our money go? Not one, but two Wars of Choice™, and according to the Washington Post, U.S. says contractor made little progress on Iraq projects. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction said Parsons, a California contractor, received “$142 million to build prisons, fire stations and police facilities in Iraq that it never built or finished”. Oh and last week, after raking in millions of dollars in Bush administration contracts, Blackwater decided to get out of the “security” business.

3. So the Washington Post reports Justice officials repeatedly broke law on hiring.

   Former Justice Department counselor Monica M. Goodling and former chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson routinely broke the law by conducting political litmus tests on candidates for jobs as immigration judges and line prosecutors, according to an inspector general’s report released today.

   Goodling passed over hundreds of qualified applicants and squashed the promotions of others after deeming candidates insufficiently loyal to the Republican party, said investigators… Sampson developed a system to screen immigration judge candidates based on improper political considerations and routinely took recommendations from the White House Office of Political Affairs and Presidential Personnel, the report said.

   Goodling regularly asked candidates for career jobs: “What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?” the report said.

   So what are the Democrats going to do about this law breaking? The Hill reports Leahy rips Bush administration over DoJ politicization.

   “The policies and attitudes of this administration encouraged politicization of the department and permitted these excesses,” Leahy stated. “It is now clear that these politically rooted actions were widespread, and could not have been done without at least the tacit approval of senior Department officials.”

   Yup, you guessed it. Not a damned thing.

4. And finally, the Earth says ‘do better’ to China. The Guardian reports an Emergency anti-smog plan announced for ‘Greyjing’. “Beijing’s Olympic organisers are planning a new set of emergency measures to reduce pollution after the draconian steps introduced a week ago failed to halt a grimy haze from smothering the host city.” A clean environment cannot simply be toggled off and on.

Original article via dissidentvoice.org.  Sub-headed: Interview with Mickey Z.

Very few things in life are certain….here is one of them.

It is easier to destroy than to build.

Let us take for example, the Bush Administration and rampant “Conservatism,” that have been the most destructive force loosed upon  the world since Nagasaki.

Ok, I guess you could argue that one. That one is far from certain…but it is pretty darn hard to deny it, from where we sit today, in the rubble of the implosion of America caused by the incompetence, intransigence and the willful  destruction of everything that those OTHER than the top 1% of the worlds rich held dear. The destruction goes beyond any single event or act that they have committed. The real damage that they have done, above and beyond all of the horrors that we in the blogosphere have documented, is this.

They tried…and are still trying…and will never stop trying….. to redefine good and evil.

They….Karl Rove and Fox News and the spin machine…tried to destroy objective fact.

They tried to take us back to a time before The Enlightenment before Reason was valued over Faith. A time when what was comfortable and convenient for the ruling class was more important than actual reality.  A time when reality was what we were TOLD it was.  Since The Enlightenment humans have tried to establish an objective reality based on empiricism, have tried to build a common language based on observable facts. Now, according to them, there are no facts, and thus no agreement, and  no commonality.

~ Don’t REC the pony ~