Category: Iraq

Have a friend that contacted me and in that e-mail she told me about a brainstorming meeting taking place just before this weekend and into, April 1-3 of the Millennial Veterans. One of the couples sons, an Afghanistan and Iraq war Veteran, he served in both theaters, is attending this gathering. This group of Millennials sounds an awful lot like what happened as to us boomer’s especially those of us after our service in the military and especially Vietnam. Matter of fact the whole movement, the Millennials, of this generational group are getting much more involved in many issues that seemed to have skipped over the couple of generations just previous to them at least for most in those generations. I’ve been watching them for a few years now. They’ve not only taken up the issues we oldsters worried about and lobbied to change, in government and in society, they’ve been expanding on them not only to fit these times but like the technology they’ve expanded the issues forward, and now some of them have not only served in War but have done so in Two occupations of choice and in more then one tour of duty.

They call it missing in action, but those soldiers are missing at home, too, at every wedding and every graduation and every holiday.

Sometimes you meet an old man who has children and grandchildren now, and he never had a father. You meet amputees who had twenty good years ahead of them, playing softball or throwing a football around on Thanksgiving or pushing a stroller and lifting a baby ever so carefully out of it…

No war ever ends.

I remember Mr. Bush in the Press Club video, looking under a table for WMDs and all the elite reporters laughing, Karl Rove and Rumsfeld laughing and all the elite reporters laughing with them. Remember them!

There’s always broken souls and crazy men raging in bare rooms, and women who wake up screaming, and children alone in the dark, listening.

Names and dates of birth on tombstones and monuments, and a mother who remembers every birthday, soldiers buried in consecrated ground and others unburied in jungles and wastelands. This was the father who would have given the bride away. This was the brother who would have been the best man.

No war ever ends.

Filmed in Iraq (the cradle of civilization) 2 weeks before “Shock and Awe”:

Saturday, 3/27/2010 Allawi’s Side Wins Iraq Elections

Ruh roh!  Tough time for incumbents….. everywhere.  Current PM Nouri al Maliki comes in 2nd in Iraq, and

….  he’s not happy.

http://english.aljazeera.net/n…

Iraq election results, out of 325 seats, 163 needed to form a government:

_______________________________________________________________________

Ayad Allawi’s Iraquiya coalition – 91 seats

Nouri al Maliki’s State of Law Alliance – 89 seats

(Shia) Iraqi National Alliance – 70 seats

Kurdistania (K. Democratic Party, Patriotic Union of K.) – 43 seats

_______________________________________________________________________

(ARC note: clever readers notice this doesn’t add up. Some small minority factions are awarded reserved seats.)

Everyone seems to know that the tea party “movement” had a rally on the steps of the capitol yesterday.  They got in the face of a few Congressmen and now every Beltway media outlet from the Washington Post to Meet the Press is talking about it.  But there was another protest in town yesterday.  Thousands of people showed up in front of the White House to tell Obama (and Congress) to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to treat Palestinians fairly, and to generally end the US military empire.

MSNBC estimates that somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 tea party people showed up at the capitol building.  Yet the low end of the estimates for the number of people who showed up at the peace demonstration (including myself) is about 2,500, and the high end is about 10,000.  Where’s our moment on Meet the Press?  Where’s our article in the New York Times?

Payback started early in this war, actually like others it started right after the invasion and then the ‘winning of hearts and minds’ as the billions flowed in and much were lost, just plain lost! They should make a movie or tv show about that, call it ‘lost’, make more sense then the one they got now.

Blair’s secret oil links to Mideast revealed

We had already started the planning and reserving the venue for the ‘teach in’, Saturday, and March of Wreaths on Sunday only weeks  before, not knowing the ‘shock and awe’ would start only a couple of days prior to.

And he got caught!

Will this bring Brown done in the coming election, while the guiltier, here and over there, maintain their freedom from their crimes!

Brown forced to change stance on army spending

Which will inflame the families of the fallen Brits who were trumpeting that the troops were under equipped and lacked training on some of the equipment they did have.  

why the fuck is Peter Orszag of OMB even commenting on this ?  

asked Compound F, earlier today.

https://www.docudharma.com/diar…

I picked this off of google cache, written post election, Nov 18 2008, marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives

Obama Wants Orszag At OMB

18 Nov 2008 03:05 pm

Barack Obama has tapped CBO director Peter Orszag to be director of the Office of Management and Budget, my collegues at National Journal report today.

He’s a youngish overachiever, just 40, and subscribes to the theory of what he once called “cool-headed, warm-hearted” economic policy. Judging by his blog, Orszag has smart and interesting things to say about the intersection of psychology and economics, the long-term vs. short-term effects of climate change legislation, honest budgeting and accounting, and lots more.

OMB is the executive branch’s budgetary arm and management oversight evaluator. The director serves as a key presidential adviser on the economy and is responsible for projecting the fiscal consequences of any presidential decision. OMB would figure out how much Barack Obama’s health care plan will cost, for example, as it gets introduced in Congress. It’ll score every bill that Congress sends to Obama. It’s the repository of policy, responsible for official statements. More to the point, though, is that OMB will administer Obama’s transparency agenda. Regulatory reform will originate at OMB.

HuffPo has been following Orszag’s love life, the love child with the Greek tycoon heiress, and the engagement to the drop dead gorgeous young Russian born ABC news “financial reporter.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

This is going to be an action packed weekend in DC and around the nation.  On Friday, there will be protests of Yoo.  On Saturday, there will be a massive antiwar demonstration (there will also be demonstrations in Philly, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and South Dakota, among other places).  On Sunday, there will be a large march for immigration reform.  And there will be other related events around the country, along with the small protests and events that happen all the time.

So join me below the fold to see how you can effect change this weekend.

Game of Life Reddit alien generator from Tom Robinson on Vimeo.

John Horton Conway’s game of “Life” is just about the simplest representation of organic processes which captures anything of their complexity, and it’s essentially unpredictable.

No one has ever discovered a general description of the sort of structure which will generate relatively simple patterns like a “reddit alien.” The folklore of “Life” evolved by trial and error over millions of hours of computer animations in math and physics and computer science departments all over the world, and the sort of people who are better at understanding this sort of thing than anybody else only slowly, slowly developed a few rules of thumb for designing simple structures whose evolution we can more or less predict, but only after observing the still unpredictable outcome of microscopic variations in initial conditions, all of them exquisitely sensitive to the alteration of even one pixel on the screen, where almost anything that you and I would call a pattern rapidly dissolves into disorder.

Now imagine a game of “Life” where the rules vary radically across the screen, external factors constantly impinge upon the game, and you don’t know the rules.

This is a picture of the American “game” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

(background: VP Biden visited Israel, Israel announces they’re building 1600 new apartments in occupied territory near Jerusalem.)

Read this and think:

H/T to Spencer Ackerman at Lake of the Fire Dogs, who pulled up the link friday:

Rozen:

http://www.politico.com/news/s…

“People who heard what Biden said [to Israeli officials behind closed doors] were stunned,” the centrist Israeli daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported. “‘This is starting to get dangerous for us,’ Biden castigated his interlocutors. ‘What you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us, and it endangers regional peace.'”

“In language that could only have been finalized shortly before he delivered the speech, Biden reiterated that it was Israel’s perceived breach of trust that had been so galling – at a time, with the fragile proximity talks just getting under way, when trust was at a premium,” Jerusalem Post editorialist David Horovitz wrote Thursday.

Ackerman:

http://attackerman.firedoglake…

Today Secretary Clinton got in the act. Netanyahu is an obstructionist and it’s good to see the Obama administration remind Israelis that its interests are not abstract things. The truth is it’s not “starting” to get dangerous for us.

My friend Daniel Levy has forgotten more about Israeli politics than I’ll know and he writes that Netanyahu may be the last best hope for the two-state solution. For the life of me I just don’t understand the logic. As best as I can understand, Daniel believes Netanyahu’s obstructionism, combined with statebuilding efforts from Salam Fayyad in the West bank, will strengthen international support for… what? Imposing a solution on Israel?

Catch the commenter #8 on March 14th 2010 at 11:09 am, at FDL

Roll out the sternly worded speeches.

Did Biden really say the U.S. troops are fighting in Pakistan? And there weren’t headlines on that?

“undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Aye yup.  When one pits one Muslim country after another, against another non Muslim country, one who is already small in size but mighty in power, with a history of justified paranoia because of World War II,  it can get dangerous for the perpetrator.   But who ever thought it would be ….  us ?

Think, Joe.  Are not we better than this ?

It gets dangerous for everybody.