Bad news all around…

It’s been a rough several weeks for President Bush and the war party. Observe some recent headlines:

“Training Iraqi troops no longer driving force in U.S. policy” — The McClatchy Newspaper story pointed out, “Military planners have abandoned the idea that training Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces.”

“U.S. Command Shortens Life of ‘Long War’ as a Reference” — The New York Times article stated, “When the Bush administration has sought to explain its strategy for fighting terrorism, it has often said the United States is involved in a ‘long war’ against Islamic extremists…. After taking over last month as the head of Central Command, Adm. William J. Fallon quietly retired the phrase. Military officials said that cultural advisers at the command had become concerned that the concept of a long war alienated Middle East audiences by suggesting that the United States would keep a large number of forces in the region indefinitely.”

“Petraeus: Iraq needs enormous commitment” — The Associated Press story said, “The U.S. military commander in Iraq says the war effort may well get harder before it gets easier and American casualties are likely to continue to climb…. While he would not predict troop levels into the fall or comment directly on the legislation Congress passed Thursday [later vetoed], his comments made clear that his war plan did not include a significant reduction of U.S. forces any time soon.”

“Inspectors Find Rebuilt Projects Crumbling in Iraq” — This New York Times article stated, “In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.”

To recap:

• The Bush administration is no longer planning to train the Iraqi military to do the main fighting; the burden will be almost entirely on the United States.
• For propaganda reasons, the phrase “long war” has been dropped from the military’s vocabulary even though …
• The top military commander in Iraq says the fighting will get fiercer, there will be more deaths, and no troops will be coming home in the near future.
• Meanwhile, even the “successful” projects carried out in Iraq by the U.S. government are falling apart.

Tags: iraq iraq war bush failure

Yes. We are too stupid to check this out…

• On Saturday, Mitt Romney warned the graduates at Pat Robertson’s Regent University: “In France, for instance, I’m told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up. How shallow and how different from the Europe of the past.” There is no truth whatsoever to the allegation that marriage is contracted for seven-year terms in France. (The institution of marriage is indeed facing a different kind of change in France — many couples live in stable relationships for decades without officially marrying, such as failed Presidential candidate Ségolène Royal and partner François Hollande. But Romney’s notion is simply untrue.)

The sad thing is that there are already people who believe this clown. http://electioncentral.tpmcafe.com/

Mr. Romney, please give us a little credit before yours is totally exhausted.

Tags: mitt romney 2008 election lies mormon france marriage

Honestly, are these morons working for us? If so, we are doomed.

Canadian ‘poppy coin’ culprit behind U.S. spy warning
WASHINGTON (AP) — An odd-looking Canadian coin with a bright red flower was the culprit behind a U.S. Defense Department false espionage warning earlier this year about mysterious coin-like objects with radio frequency transmitters.

The harmless “poppy coin” was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them.

The worried contractors described the coins as “anomalous” and “filled with something man-made that looked like nanotechnology,” according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

This year’s proposed US spending on the Iraq war is larger than the military budgets of China and Russia combined. The combined spending requests would push the total for Iraq to US$564 billion, according to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS).

Total proposed US military spending for 2008 is larger than military spending by all of the other nations in the world combined. It is:

•10 times the military budget of the second-largest military spending country in the world, China;

•larger than the combined gross domestic products of all 47 countries in sub-Saharan Africa;

•more than 30 times higher than all spending on State Department operations and non-military foreign aid combined;

•more than 120 times higher than the roughly $5 billion per year the US government spends on combatting global warming

According to an April 27 article “Iraq war: a nice little earner” in Asia Times Online by Ismael Hossein-zadeh, an economics professor at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa, said:

Although the official military budget already eats up the lion’s share of the public money (crowding out vital domestic needs), it nonetheless grossly understates the true magnitude of military spending. The real national defense budget, according to Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute, is nearly twice as much as the official budget.
The reason for this understatement is that the official Department of Defense budget excludes not only the cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also a number of other major cost items.

That sort of money could go a long way to addressing so many of the world’s most urgent problems. But war is a very profitable business for some very big and powerful corporations such as Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Vinnell and Blackwater. It has been argued that rather than profiteering from war, these corporations are making war for profit. Many of them would not exist as we know them without war.

Halliburton alone has already taken more than $13 billion from no-bid/no-audit US government contracts for providing everything from pizzas to security personnel in Iraq.

US Vice President and former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney currently holds 100,000 shares of unexercised stock options in Halliburton with a gross value of $3.2 million.

So the term “capitalist war-mongers” isn’t just a slogan — it’s a statement of an ugly reality.

I always enjoy it when the holier than thous decide when someone is not Christian enough for them. Evidently Mormons need not apply.

Selecting presidential candidate Mitt Romney as its May commencement speaker has riled some of Regent University’s students and alumni who say his Mormon faith clashes with the school’s bedrock evangelical Christianity.

“What we’re against is the fact that Mormonism is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from Christian values and what we believe,” said Doug Dowdey, a Virginia Beach pastor who said he graduated from Regent’s divinity school last year.

Wired Magazine reports on new restrictions on Army bloggers.

The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops’ online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.

I’m no expert on the UCMJ, but, since Bloggers are more and more considered to be Journalists, one has to wonder what the military is thinking. You, know, the First Amendment and all that silliness.

Once again the US military has massacred a large number of civilians in the occupied territories. 51 Afghan villagers were killed. Many of them women and children. Of course the Pentagon denies any knowledge of any wrong doing - as they always do, until a whistle blower comes forward.

Those denials work on American TV, because the Pentagton statements are repeated verbatim by the US media, thus ensuring that American audiences never know what is true and what is not. The media doesn’t bother to check whether those Pentagon denials are actually true or not, they just repeat them word for word and call that journalism. And republican sheep are trained that one must always believe their own government. They would never lie to us, would they?

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Those people who have not yet been brainwashed by the “Obey” message of the right-wing media outlets, have long been suspecting that the so-called War on Terror is just a fig leaf to justify US neo-colonialism in the Middle East, in order to bring the world’s largest remaining oil supplies under US control in preparation for what the Cheney/Baker report “Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For The 21st Century” called a future of “severve oil shortages” and “unprecedented energy price volatility.”

The papertrail proving that “war for oil” has become official US government policy leads back almost 10 years:

Oil wars Pentagon’s policy since 1999
A top-level United States policy document has emerged that explicitly confirms the Defence Department’s readiness to fight an oil war.

According to the report, Strategic Assessment 1999, prepared for the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defence, “energy and resource issues will continue to shape international security”.

Oil conflicts over production facilities and transport routes, particularly in the Persian Gulf and Caspian regions, are specifically envisaged.

Although the policy does not forecast imminent US military conflict, it vividly highlights how the highest levels of the US Defence community accepted the waging of an oil war as a legitimate military option.

Strategic Assessment also forecasts that if an oil “problem” arises, “US forces might be used to ensure adequate supplies”.

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The following video clips are an interview with Noam Chomsky on the Canadian show Hot Type on CBC:

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A while ago a Gallup poll confirmed once again that only about one third of all Americans believe that evolution is a fact. 45% of Americans seriously believe there was no evolution, and a third of all Americans believe that the bible is the literal, infallible word of God, describing word for word how mankind came to be… without evolution.

This poll made its rounds all over the international media, and once again dumb Americans are a laughing stock around the world. How embarrassing:

Creationism and the U.S.

A craziness difficult to understand for Europeans

[…]

Within the United States the Deep South has the poorest standardized test scores. Among industrialized nations the U.S. consistently ranks toward the bottom on most scales, even while spending more than average.

[…]

Textbook companies sell different textbooks in different states – it’s big business. The tragic result usually has been textbooks of incredibly low quality, like described by Richard Feynman and later published as a chapter in his autobiographical book “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”. And, of course, the creationists. As part of the political “religious right” they have in recent decades exerted considerable influence as when Reagan made a campaign promise to abolish the federal Department of Education. All of these political forces work toward keeping the educational system decentralized, over-ruling the widely-held public sense of badly needed reform, and resulting in creationism as a persistent issue in the United States.

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