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Killed by Contempt
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Each day since Katrina brings more evidence of the lethal ineptitude of federal officials. I'm not letting state and local officials off the hook, but federal officials had access to resources that could have made all the difference, but were never mobilized.
Here's one of many examples: The Chicago Tribune reports that the U.S.S. Bataan, equipped with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds and the ability to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has been sitting off the Gulf Coast since last Monday - without patients.
Experts say that the first 72 hours after a natural disaster are the crucial window during which prompt action can save many lives. Yet action after Katrina was anything but prompt. Newsweek reports that a "strange paralysis" set in among Bush administration officials, who debated lines of authority while thousands died.
What caused that paralysis? President Bush certainly failed his test. After 9/11, all the country really needed from him was a speech. This time it needed action - and he didn't deliver.
But the federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn't forthcoming?
Does anyone remember the fight over federalizing airport security? Even after 9/11, the administration and conservative members of Congress tried to keep airport security in the hands of private companies. They were more worried about adding federal employees than about closing a deadly hole in national security.
Of course, the attempt to keep airport security private wasn't just about philosophy; it was also an attempt to protect private interests. But that's not really a contradiction. Ideological cynicism about government easily morphs into a readiness to treat government spending as a way to reward your friends. After all, if you don't believe government can do any good, why not?
Which brings us to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In my last column, I asked whether the Bush administration had destroyed FEMA's effectiveness. Now we know the answer.
Several recent news analyses on FEMA's sorry state have attributed the agency's decline to its inclusion in the Department of Homeland Security, whose prime concern is terrorism, not natural disasters. But that supposed change in focus misses a crucial part of the story.
For one thing, the undermining of FEMA began as soon as President Bush took office. Instead of choosing a professional with expertise in responses to disaster to head the agency, Mr. Bush appointed Joseph Allbaugh, a close political confidant. Mr. Allbaugh quickly began trying to scale back some of FEMA's preparedness programs.
You might have expected the administration to reconsider its hostility to emergency preparedness after 9/11 - after all, emergency management is as important in the aftermath of a terrorist attack as it is following a natural disaster. As many people have noticed, the failed response to Katrina shows that we are less ready to cope with a terrorist attack today than we were four years ago.
But the downgrading of FEMA continued, with the appointment of Michael Brown as Mr. Allbaugh's successor.
Mr. Brown had no obvious qualifications, other than having been Mr. Allbaugh's college roommate. But Mr. Brown was made deputy director of FEMA; The Boston Herald reports that he was forced out of his previous job, overseeing horse shows. And when Mr. Allbaugh left, Mr. Brown became the agency's director. The raw cronyism of that appointment showed the contempt the administration felt for the agency; one can only imagine the effects on staff morale.
That contempt, as I've said, reflects a general hostility to the role of government as a force for good. And Americans living along the Gulf Coast have now reaped the consequences of that hostility.
The administration has always tried to treat 9/11 purely as a lesson about good versus evil. But disasters must be coped with, even if they aren't caused by evildoers. Now we have another deadly lesson in why we need an effective government, and why dedicated public servants deserve our respect. Will we listen?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/opinion/05krugman.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dE...
United States of Shame
By MAUREEN DOWD
Stuff happens.
And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens.
America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it's happening in America.
W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn't dry. Bye, bye, American lives. "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," he told Diane Sawyer.
Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N'Awlins. He was clearly moved. "You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen." Out of the cameras' range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.
Why does this self-styled "can do" president always lapse into such lame "who could have known?" excuses.
Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-9/11 intelligence briefs.
Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn a brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any official who bothered to read the C.I.A.'s prewar reports.
Who on earth could have known that New Orleans's sinking levees were at risk from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over the years about the Big Easy's uneasy fishbowl.
In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30 percent of the National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq.
Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.
Just last year, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials practiced how they would respond to a fake hurricane that caused floods and stranded New Orleans residents. Imagine the feeble FEMA's response to Katrina if they had not prepared.
Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.
Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle - Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine - lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.
When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.
When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.
Who are we if we can't take care of our own?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/opinion/03dowd.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2...
More victims of the war?
By Tom Hennessy
Staff columnist
People saw it coming.
They did not know the hour, the day, the year. But they knew it was coming. New Orleans, a city much like Long Beach in population (484,000 in the city proper) had an almost inevitable date with disaster.
When it was founded in 1718 by Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, he was warned that he was picking the wrong place. Six feet below sea level on average, the city grew in a bowl bordered by the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain.
Nearly 300 years later, Jay Grimes, Louisiana's climatologist, also saw it coming. Under certain circumstances, he said, "the flooding may be more severe coming from the lake than coming from the Gulf (of Mexico)."
He was proved right this week. The water that has brought havoc to New Orleans came not so much from the sky, but from the massive lake.
Some in Congress saw it coming. After flooding from a rainstorm killed six people in 1995, they authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project SELA. Over the next decade, $430 million was spent to shore up levees and build pumping stations. But $250 million in SELA projects still awaited funding.
The money never came.
Vanishing dollars
When SELA funds began drying up in 2003, the Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for the project, did not hesitate to explain why. It blamed the cut-off on the diversion of money to the Iraq War and to homeland security, combined with simultaneous federal tax cuts.
The New Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune, also saw it coming. In its online issue Tuesday, Editor and Publisher, the magazine of the newspaper industry, connects the flooding caused by Katrina to the warnings from the Times-Picayune:
"At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cited the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane-and flood-control dollars."
Whose homeland?
Walter Maestri also saw it coming. On June 8, 2004, the head of public emergencies for neighboring Jefferson Parish, the region's largest suburb, said this to the Times-Picayune:
"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Only days ago, Maestri ran an exercise in which a fictitious hurricane hit New Orleans. He later said, "When the exercise was completed, it was evident we were going to lose a lot of people."
For those of us who oppose the war, there is a temptation to blame all our national ills on it. In this case, however, the connection is clear cut. Over the next few days, you are apt to hear more about this from the media.
The administration will ignore criticism or spin it into something else. In the White House, seemingly incapable of admitting error, no one will concede that money which might have eased the devastation in New Orleans has gone to ground in the sands of the desert.
Most of us understand that the country's needs come first. But which country?
Ahhh....gotta love Bush's 'Christian' values...
While President George W. Bush travels around the country in a last-ditch effort to sell his Iraq war, White House aides scramble frantically behind the scenes to hide the dark mood of an increasingly angry leader who unleashes obscenity-filled outbursts at anyone who dares disagree with him.
My Private Idaho
By MAUREEN DOWD
August 24, 2005
W. vacationed so hard in Texas he got bushed. He needed a vacation from his vacation.
The most rested president in American history headed West yesterday to get away from his Western getaway - and the mushrooming Crawford Woodstock - and spend a couple of days at the Tamarack Resort in the rural Idaho mountains.
"I'm kind of hangin' loose, as they say," he told reporters.
As The Financial Times noted, Mr. Bush is acting positively French in his love of le loafing, with 339 days at his ranch since he took office - nearly a year out of his five. Most Americans, on the other hand, take fewer vacations than anyone else in the developed world (even the Japanese), averaging only 13 to 16 days off a year.
W. didn't go alone, of course. Just as he took his beloved feather pillow on the road during his 2000 campaign, now he takes his beloved bike. An Air Force One steward tenderly unloaded W.'s $3,000 Trek Fuel mountain bike when they landed in Boise.
Gas is guzzling toward $3 a gallon. U.S. troop casualties in Iraq are at their highest levels since the invasion. As Donald Rumsfeld conceded yesterday, "The lethality, however, is up." Afghanistan's getting more dangerous, too. The defense secretary says he's raising troop levels in both places for coming elections.
So our overextended troops must prepare for more forced rotations, while the president hangs loose.
I mean, I like to exercise, but W. is psychopathic about it. He interviewed one potential Supreme Court nominee, Harvie Wilkinson III, by asking him how much he exercised. Last winter, Mr. Bush was obsessed with his love handles, telling people he was determined to get rid of seven pounds.
Shouldn't the president worry more about body armor than body fat?
Instead of calling in Karl Rove to ask him if he'd leaked, W. probably called him in to order him to the gym.
The rest of us may be fixated on the depressing tableau in Iraq, where the U.S. seems to be delivering a fundamentalist Islamic state into the dirty hands of men like Ahmad Chalabi, who conned the neocons into pushing for war, and his ally Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who started two armed uprisings against U.S. troops. It was his militiamen who ambushed Casey Sheehan's convoy in Sadr City.
America has caved on Iraqi women's rights. In fact, the women's rights activists supported by George and Laura Bush may have to leave Iraq.
But, as a former C.I.A. Middle East specialist, Reuel Marc Gerecht, said on "Meet the Press," U.S. democracy in 1900 didn't let women vote. If Iraqi democracy resembled that, "we'd all be thrilled," he said. "I mean, women's social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy."
Yesterday, the president hailed the constitution establishing an Islamic republic as "an amazing process," and said it "honors women's rights, the rights of minorities." Could he really think that? Or is he following the Vietnam model - declaring victory so we can leave?
The main point of writing a constitution was to move Sunnis into the mainstream and make them invested in the process, thereby removing the basis of the insurgency. But the Shiites and Kurds have frozen out the Sunnis, enhancing their resentment. So the insurgency is more likely to be inflamed than extinguished.
For political reasons, the president has a history of silence on America's war dead. But he finally mentioned them on Monday because it became politically useful to use them as a rationale for war - now that all the other rationales have gone up in smoke.
"We owe them something," he told veterans in Salt Lake City (even though his administration tried to shortchange the veterans agency by $1.5 billion). "We will finish the task that they gave their lives for."
What twisted logic: with no W.M.D., no link to 9/11 and no democracy, now we have to keep killing people and have our kids killed because so many of our kids have been killed already? Talk about a vicious circle: the killing keeps justifying itself.
Just because the final reason the president came up with for invading Iraq - to create a democracy with freedom of religion and minority rights - has been dashed, why stop relaxing? W. is determined to stay the course on bike trails all over the West.
This president has never had to pull all-nighters or work very hard, because Daddy's friends always gave him a boost when he flamed out. When was the last time Mr. Bush saw the clock strike midnight? At these prices, though, I guess he can't afford to burn the midnight oil.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/24/opinion/24dowd.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2...
Raymond,
Good article, unfortunately about 4 years too late. Now that Bush and his oil cronies are reaping a windfall and Americans have not been asked to sacrifice a damn thing on his supposed 'war on terror' he now decides to require auto makers to up minimum fuel standards. Should have done that after 9/11 and imposed a gas tax too boot. But, of course, the tax cut group would scream bloody murder. So rather than have high gas prices and keep some within our country we send it all to countries that hate us and plot against us. What a joke.
and zitboy will be right behind him...
Pulling the building down on our heads
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate
AUSTIN - If you had done a poll in November 2000, or in November 2004, I don't think you would have gotten out of single digits with this proposition: "George W. Bush wants to radically revise American law, including complete repeal of the New Deal, and take us back to the economic legal system that prevailed at the turn of the 19th century -- Robber Barons Redux."
During the past five years, both media and political circles have devoted an enormous amount of attention to social issues and culture wars -- the rise of the Christian Right, anti-abortion groups, our debates over moral decline and moral relativism, prayer in the schools, school vouchers, displaying the Ten Commandments, sex and violence in entertainment, bias in the news media, gay marriage and all the rest of it.
I sometimes think all of it amounts to a bunch of people saying, "The world would be a much better place if everybody else thought exactly the same way I do."
Reminds me of Henry Higgins in his famous philosophical disquisition, "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" Higgins finally discovers the ultimate problem: "Why can't a woman be more like ME?"
Then, of necessity, we have spent huge amounts of time on Sept. 11, terrorism, Iraq, and related and ancillary problems. It is not necessary to review the bidding here, but Iraq is becoming as divisive and unpopular as the Vietnam War.
While we have been absorbed in the silly circus of cultural issues and the riveting questions of the war, we've also been getting our pockets picked. Big-time.
I am impressed that cartoonist Lloyd Dangle in the strip Troubletown managed to get the whole problem into 12 panels, each announcing some piece of economic news accompanied by an American saying, essentially, "What, me worry?"
The United States is more than $7 trillion in debt (no problem); China buys $1 billion worth of U.S. treasury bills a day (thanks for floating us); Americans love the prices at Wal-Mart (made in China -- cute!); the Chinese save 50 percent of their domestic product; the average American has $9,000 on his credit cards; our economy is fueled by a fragile housing bubble; the minimum wage is $5.15 per hour; taxpayers who earn more than $1 million saved $30K under Bush tax cuts; the war in Iraq costs $9 billion a month; by 2040, our kids will be unable to do more than pay the interest on the national debt; bankruptcy reform makes it impossible to escape your debts; in Darfur, people earn $1.25 a day.
For those who prefer to get their economic news from a more respectable source than a cartoon, I recommend Bill Greider's Op-Ed article in the July 18 New York Times, "America's Truth Deficit."
He begins with the startling thesis that we face structural economic problems as serious as those that destroyed the late Soviet Union and that, as in that country before its breakup, our leaders cannot talk about these problems honestly.
"[Our] weakening position in the global trading system is obvious and ominous, yet leaders in politics, business, finance and the news media are not willing to discuss candidly what is happening and why," Greidner writes. "Instead they recycle the usual bromides about the benefits of free trade and assurances that everything will work out for the best."
It is a curious thing that as the disadvantages and, indeed, perils of globalization become clearer and the subject of ever more worried books by respected economists, the mainstream media keep treating the whole problem as though it were about a bunch of protesters in turtle costumes at the G-8 summit. If it were not for Lou Dobbs on CNN, one would never even hear it mentioned on television.
Forget what the Supreme Court thinks about teaching creationism in the schools. Think about what it will contribute to the spiraling disasters of globalization by dismantling the entire economic regulatory system built up over the past 100 years.
As Greider notes, "Washington defines 'national interest' primarily in terms of advancing the global reach of our multinational enterprises."
The problem is that our multinational corporations increasingly work against the interests of Americans themselves. In addition to outsourcing jobs, the companies locate sham headquarters in off-shore tax havens to avoid paying taxes.
The only restraints we have ever had on multinational corporations are government regulation and the right to sue for the various kinds of harm they cause. It is precisely those two forms of control that are being not just undermined but tossed out entirely by an increasingly activist right-wing judiciary.
Recommended reading: Greider's One World, Ready Or Not; David Korten's When Corporations Rule the World; and Paul Krugman's The Great Unraveling.
http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/columnists/molly_ivins/12206161.htm?template=contentModules...
Shots to the Heart of Iraq
Innocent civilians, including people who are considered vital to building democracy, are increasingly being killed by U.S. troops.
By Richard C. Paddock
Times Staff Writer
July 25, 2005
BAGHDAD — Three men in an unmarked sedan pulled up near the headquarters of the national police major crimes unit. The two passengers, wearing traditional Arab dishdasha gowns, stepped from the car.
At the same moment, a U.S. military convoy emerged from an underpass. Apparently believing the men were staging an ambush, the Americans fired, killing one passenger and wounding the other. The sedan's driver was hit in the head by two bullet fragments.
The soldiers drove on without stopping.
This kind of shooting is far from rare in Baghdad, but the driver of the car was no ordinary casualty. He was Iraqi police Brig. Gen. Majeed Farraji, chief of the major crimes unit. His passengers were unarmed hitchhikers whom he was dropping off on his way to work.
"The reason they shot us is just because the Americans are reckless," the general said from his hospital bed hours after the July 6 shooting, his head wrapped in a white bandage. "Nobody punishes them or blames them."
Angered by the growing number of unarmed civilians killed by American troops in recent weeks, the Iraqi government criticized the shootings and called on U.S. troops to exercise greater care.
U.S. officials have repeatedly declined requests to disclose the number of civilians killed in such incidents. Police in Baghdad say they have received reports that U.S. forces killed 33 unarmed civilians and injured 45 in the capital between May 1 and July 12 — an average of nearly one fatality every two days. This does not include incidents that occurred elsewhere in the country or were not reported to the police.
The continued shooting of civilians is fueling a growing dislike of the United States and undermining efforts to convince the public that American soldiers are here to help. The victims have included doctors, journalists, a professor — the kind of people the U.S. is counting on to help build an open and democratic society.
"Of course the shootings will increase support for the opposition," said Farraji, 49, who was named a police general with U.S. approval. "The hatred of the Americans has increased. I myself hate them."
Among the biggest threats U.S. forces face are suicide attacks. Soldiers are exposed as they stand watch at checkpoints or ride on patrol in the turrets of their Humvees. The willingness of the assailants to die makes the attacks difficult to guard against. By their nature, the bombings erode the troops' trust of the public; every civilian becomes suspect.
U.S. military officials say the troops must protect themselves by shooting the driver of any suspicious vehicle before it reaches them.
Heavily armed private security contractors, who number in the tens of thousands, also are authorized by the U.S. government to use deadly force to protect themselves.
One contractor who works for the U.S. government and saw a colleague killed in a suicide bombing said it was better to shoot an innocent person than to risk being killed.
"I'd rather be tried by 12 than carried by six," said the contractor, who insisted that he not be identified by name because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
The U.S. military says it investigates all shootings by American personnel that result in death. But U.S. Brig. Gen. Don Alston, spokesman for the multinational force in Iraq, said he was unaware of any soldier disciplined for shooting a civilian at a checkpoint or in traffic. Findings are seldom made public.
A senior U.S. military official in Baghdad, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said "making no new enemies" was one of the military's priorities. At the same time, he said, "it's still a combat zone. There are going to be times when what the soldier needs to do and what the civilian feels he should be able to do come into conflict."
On June 27, the day he turned 49, Salah Jmor arrived in Baghdad to visit his family.
His father, Abdul-Rihman Jmor, is the chief of a Kurdish clan that numbers more than 20,000. Salah had left Iraq 25 years ago for Switzerland, where he earned a doctorate in international relations and eventually became a Swiss citizen.
For a decade, he represented Iraqi Kurds at the United Nations Office at Geneva. In 1988, he helped call the world's attention to Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons on Kurds in the northern Iraqi town of Halabja and the massacre of at least 100,000 Kurds in what is known as the Anfal campaign.
After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Salah Jmor was offered a post in the new Iraqi government. But he turned it down, preferring to remain in Geneva, where he was an associate professor at the Center for International and Comparative Programs of Kent State University of Ohio.
The morning after he arrived in Baghdad, he decided to go with his younger brother, architect Abdul-Jabbar Jmor, to his office. Abdul-Jabbar, 38, drove his Opel hatchback down the eight-lane Mohammed Qasim highway through central Baghdad. It was 9:30 a.m. and many vehicles were on the road.
The Opel hatchback is a model favored by insurgents.
The brothers were in the fast lane as a U.S. military convoy of three Humvees was entering the highway from the Gailani onramp. Neither of them saw the soldiers, Abdul-Jabbar said.
Abruptly, Salah slumped over into his brother's lap. Abdul-Jabbar asked what was wrong and then saw blood pouring from Salah's head. There was a single bullet hole in the windshield.
He saw the convoy moving ahead as he pulled over to the side of the road. He said he had seen no signal to slow down and heard no warning shot.
The soldiers turned around and came back a few minutes later. One said he was sorry, Abdul-Jabbar said. Together they waited more than an hour for an ambulance to arrive.
"I asked them, 'Why didn't you shoot me? I am the driver,' " Abdul-Jabbar recalled. "But they didn't answer me."
Abdul-Jabbar said he and his family had supported the U.S. troops when they first invaded Iraq, but no longer.
"This kind of incident makes people hate the Americans more and more," he said. "They don't care about the lives of the people. Each day they make new enemies."
Switzerland has requested an explanation of Jmor's killing. In Washington, the State Department said the United States had sent its condolences to the Swiss government and Jmor's family and that the Pentagon had begun an investigation. In Baghdad, Abdul-Jabbar said the family had met with the Swiss ambassador but had received no expression of condolences from the U.S. government. No U.S. investigator has contacted the family, he added.
There is a strong tradition of revenge in Iraq's tribal culture. The killing of such a prominent clan member could have triggered a bloodbath that would claim 200 lives, said the patriarch, Abdul-Rihman. But the Jmors, a well-educated family of doctors and engineers, say they want the judicial process to hold Salah's killer accountable.
"People say if they kill my brother, I have to kill one of them," Abdul-Jabbar said. "But I believe in justice. I can't just go kill them. The United States says it is the leader of justice in the world. Let us see that."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In Iraq, the U.S. military has redefined the rules of the road.
Military checkpoints — elaborate affairs with mazes of concrete barriers, razor wire and snipers' nests — have been set up at intersections all over Baghdad. Signs are posted in English and Arabic saying "Deadly Force Authorized." Cars that approach too quickly risk being fired upon by troops who shoot to kill.
At times, troops set up temporary checkpoints during raids or other military operations. These can be even more dangerous for civilians because they can appear on city streets without warning.
Military convoys, usually made up of three Humvees, patrol the streets. In each vehicle, a gunner stands with his upper body partially exposed and ready to operate a machine gun mounted on the roof. For troops, it is among the most hazardous places to be in Iraq.
The military expects all vehicles to stay at least 100 yards from a convoy. When cars come too close, troops signal them to move back, sometimes by waving a little stop sign and sometimes by holding up a clenched fist.
Some Iraqis say the fist can be easy to miss. It also can be confusing for motorists in Iraq, where the normal signal for stop is an upraised open hand, as it is in the United States.
On the highway, traffic normally bunches up well behind the American Hummers. But keeping the required distance from a convoy can be difficult when the military vehicles unexpectedly change course or merge onto a highway.
The U.S. rules of engagement call for "escalation of force" when a vehicle comes too close. Soldiers are trained to give hand and arm signals first, then fire warning shots and ultimately shoot to kill, the senior U.S. official said.
"Nothing in the rules of engagement takes away the right of self-defense for him and his buddies if the soldier feels threatened," he said. More than 1,770 U.S. troops have died in the Iraq theater since the March 2003 invasion.
Despite the rising number of civilian deaths, the official said escalation-of-force incidents had fallen by half in the past four months. He declined to provide specific figures.
According to one European diplomat, the American military's emphasis on protecting its troops has made U.S. soldiers more likely to kill and injure civilians than are other members of the coalition, such as the British, who are stationed in southern Iraq.
"The U.S. has force protection as their No. 1 priority," said the diplomat, who asked not to be identified because his remarks did not have his government's prior approval.
"The British have it as a priority, but not by any stretch the absolute priority. I think that makes the U.S. soldiers more jumpy."
Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of the transitional National Assembly, said he personally knew three people, including Salah Jmor, who had been shot and killed by U.S. troops during traffic incidents. Of the other two, one was an athlete, the other a doctor who had been called to her hospital to handle an emergency.
"I understand American soldiers are nervous. It's very dangerous," said Othman, who was a member of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council that helped run Iraq after the invasion. "But the killings are undermining support for the U.S. government. It has helped people who call themselves the opposition. It has helped terrorism."
A recent case highlighted by the Iraqi government in its criticism of the U.S. was the June 24 killing of Yasser Salihee, 30, an Iraqi special correspondent for Knight-Ridder newspapers. Salihee, a physician, had taken a rare day off and planned to take his wife and daughter swimming. He went to get gasoline and was returning home at midmorning. By then, U.S. troops were conducting a military operation in his neighborhood. It appears he did not see them until it was too late.
The route he chose was not blocked off and there was no sign warning motorists to halt, witnesses say. As he neared the scene of the military operation, a U.S. Army sniper fired at his car. One bullet hit a tire. The other hit Salihee in the forehead. That bullet also severed fingers on his right hand, indicating he was holding up at least one of his hands at the time he was killed. U.S. officials are investigating the shooting.
Salihee's widow, Raghad al Wazzan, said she accepted the American soldiers' presence when they first arrived in Iraq because "they came and liberated us." She sometimes helped them at the hospital where she works as a doctor. But not anymore.
"Now, after they killed my husband, I hate them," she said. "I want to blow them all up."
*
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-civilians25jul25,0,2297657,print.story?coll=la-ho...
Yep, that's an elephant, all right
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate
AUSTIN - Now it's getting funnier and funnier. There is an elephant in the living room, and we're sitting around having a conversation about whether there's an elephant in the living room.
The entire Republican Party is shocked (!) that anyone would think that Karl Rove (!!) would leak a story to damage a political opponent. Oh, the horror.
Have Republicans actually convinced themselves that he wouldn't do such a thing?
Actually, we are missing the point here -- the point being that Joseph Wilson is merely one of the many people who provided one of the by now innumerable pieces of evidence that this administration lied about why we went to war in Iraq.
When former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill wrote that President Bush planned to invade Iraq from the day he took office, the administration went after O'Neill. When Richard Clarke disclosed that the Bushies wanted to use Sept. 11 to go after Saddam Hussein from Sept. 12 on, they went after Clarke.
They went after Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni; they went after Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki and everyone else who opposed the folly or told the truth about it.
After they got done lying about weapons of mass destruction and about connections to al Qaeda, they switched to the stomach-churning pretense that we had done it all for democracy. Urp.
We suffer the worst attack on this country since Pearl Harbor, and the Bush administration sends the FBI after the American Civil Liberties Union.
The ACLU exists to protect every citizen's rights as defined in the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of the United States. The ACLU works solely through the legal system -- it does not advocate violence, terrorism or anything other than the Bill of Rights.
Since when is that extremist? Why in the name of heaven are we wasting the FBI's time on this idiocy?
I don't pretend to be an expert on counterterrorism, but if it were up to me, I wouldn't start looking for the violence-prone in pacifist groups, either. Your pacifists, you see … oh, just look it up.
I know that sludge-for-brains like Bill O'Reilly attack the ACLU for being "un-American," but when O'Reilly's constitutional rights are violated, the ACLU will stand up for him just like it did for Oliver North, Communists, the KKK, atheists, movement conservatives and everyone else it has defended over the years.
The premise is easily understood: If the government can take away one person's rights, it can take away everyone's.
We are living in a time when our government is investigating an organization that stands for the highest and best American ideals -- and claiming the mantle of patriotism while it goes about it.
This is cuckoo -- and an idiotic waste of the FBI's time and the taxpayers' money.
But even that is superseded by what is at the heart of Plamegate: lying to get this country into war.
If the Washington press corps had a memory bank longer than 10 minutes, its members could have exposed this years ago -- the lies so often directly contradict one another. Before the war, the CIA was such a wussy organization that it kept trying to downplay weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. After the war, it was all the CIA's fault -- it had exaggerated the weapons of mass destruction. And so on and so on.
The trouble with piling lies on top of lies is that we can't even agree on facts anymore. I read the right-wing commentators, and it's not that we're not on the same page -- we're not even in the same library.
They read the Downing Street memos and convince themselves that they don't mean what they say. I really don't understand. Is it that hard to admit you're wrong when you're wrong? Is it that hard to admit that the invasion of Iraq has been a disaster? Isn't it self-evident?
If you support someone politically, you are not required to believe they are perfect. Did I think Bill Clinton had a sleazy affair while he was president? Yes. I just didn't care. I didn't think it had anything to do with the way he was running the country.
You can't dismiss this. You can't not care about lies and war. Not if you care about American soldiers.
http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/columnists/molly_ivins/12186230.htm
Rooster, I am glad to see the foot that permanently protrudes from you mouth has not hindered your typing. You did get part of it right, though, 'W and his gang'.
Karl Rove's America
By PAUL KRUGMAN
John Gibson of Fox News says that Karl Rove should be given a medal. I agree: Mr. Rove should receive a medal from the American Political Science Association for his pioneering discoveries about modern American politics. The medal can, if necessary, be delivered to his prison cell.
What Mr. Rove understood, long before the rest of us, is that we're not living in the America of the past, where even partisans sometimes changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we're living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth. In particular, there are now few, if any, limits to what conservative politicians can get away with: the faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern.
I first realized that we were living in Karl Rove's America during the 2000 presidential campaign, when George W. Bush began saying things about Social Security privatization and tax cuts that were simply false. At first, I thought the Bush campaign was making a big mistake - that these blatant falsehoods would be condemned by prominent Republican politicians and Republican economists, especially those who had spent years building reputations as advocates of fiscal responsibility. In fact, with hardly any exceptions they lined up to praise Mr. Bush's proposals.
But the real demonstration that Mr. Rove understands American politics better than any pundit came after 9/11.
Every time I read a lament for the post-9/11 era of national unity, I wonder what people are talking about. On the issues I was watching, the Republicans' exploitation of the atrocity began while ground zero was still smoldering.
Mr. Rove has been much criticized for saying that liberals responded to the attack by wanting to offer the terrorists therapy - but what he said about conservatives, that they "saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war," is equally false. What many of them actually saw was a domestic political opportunity - and none more so than Mr. Rove.
A less insightful political strategist might have hesitated right after 9/11 before using it to cast the Democrats as weak on national security. After all, there were no facts to support that accusation.
But Mr. Rove understood that the facts were irrelevant. For one thing, he knew he could count on the administration's supporters to obediently accept a changing story line. Read the before-and-after columns by pro-administration pundits about Iraq: before the war they castigated the C.I.A. for understating the threat posed by Saddam's W.M.D.; after the war they castigated the C.I.A. for exaggerating the very same threat.
Mr. Rove also understands, better than anyone else in American politics, the power of smear tactics. Attacks on someone who contradicts the official line don't have to be true, or even plausible, to undermine that person's effectiveness. All they have to do is get a lot of media play, and they'll create the sense that there must be something wrong with the guy.
And now we know just how far he was willing to go with these smear tactics: as part of the effort to discredit Joseph Wilson IV, Mr. Rove leaked the fact that Mr. Wilson's wife worked for the C.I.A. I don't know whether Mr. Rove can be convicted of a crime, but there's no question that he damaged national security for partisan advantage. If a Democrat had done that, Republicans would call it treason.
But what we're getting, instead, is yet another impressive demonstration that these days, truth is political. One after another, prominent Republicans and conservative pundits have declared their allegiance to the party line. They haven't just gone along with the diversionary tactics, like the irrelevant questions about whether Mr. Rove used Valerie Wilson's name in identifying her (Robert Novak later identified her by her maiden name, Valerie Plame), or the false, easily refuted claim that Mr. Wilson lied about who sent him to Niger. They're now a chorus, praising Mr. Rove as a patriotic whistle-blower.
Ultimately, this isn't just about Mr. Rove. It's also about Mr. Bush, who has always known that his trusted political adviser - a disciple of the late Lee Atwater, whose smear tactics helped President Bush's father win the 1988 election - is a thug, and obviously made no attempt to find out if he was the leaker.
Most of all, it's about what has happened to America. How did our political system get to this point?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/opinion/15krugman.html?incamp=article_popular&pagewanted=print
Rooster, that post is a classic, and deserves a hearty....
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Sorry! No one did anything wrong, and W will continue to guide this country back in the right direction!
Rooster, I don't think Bush is dumb, just lacking curiousity in his thinking (something he is quite comfortable not having to do), unable (unwilling) to correct mistakes when proven wrong and simplistic in his dogmatic approach to answers.
That is what is frustrating for "us'all'". Now, to say he has managed to do everything right...well, that's a good one, Rooster. The war??? Surely, you jest. In fact, I would submit he has done most everything WRONG at an enormous cost that has yet to be remotely felt. The economy??? Let's just say there is a part of me, a very small part of me, that would be content with the Reps winning the White House in '08, 'cause when the sheeet hits the fan, oh somewhere around '09, the Reps will have NO ONE to blame but themselves. Then, when the country is totally screwed up, to use your words, who are you going to blame, Rooster?? LOL, I'm sure you'll find a way:)
"How must it feel knowing that the man that y'all think is so dumb, has managed to do everything so right? It's got to be frustrating for y'all! The war, The economy, and next the judges for the Supreme Court! Those new judges will finally end the rein of all the liberal left winger who tried to totally screw up this country."
Rooster, I suppose in your neck of the woods, with the 'right' diet, a turd can be baked into gold. Care to make a wager on that 'surplus'??? LOL, I loved this quote:
``Given the pace of income, wage and salary growth, there'll be plenty of money in the coffers,''
Once again, zit, wrong, wrong and wrong. Another one of your three-legged stools
zit -- the evident fact that your own....blah....blah...blah
spare me!
by the way, the reports that Rove indeed was
we're supposed to believe that rove, the most brilliant mind in d.c., the political strategizing genius, bush's brain, is as dumb as a rock when it comes to the plame outing?....puhhhhhhleeeeeeeez!.....what does make sense is when novak broke the story, rove was one of the first to get wind of it, and contacted his political team to see what it meant.......he is gwb's political strategist, you know?......besides, getting a heads up on the next day's stories from an inside newspaper source is not treason
outed Plame and thus directly caused the virtually instantaneous disembowelment...blah...blah...blah
she was a soccer mom in d.c........besides, calimnious distorted disembowelments was her husband's expertise
at the highest levels of dubya's crew, from which it has long been established beyond any question that the Plame leak originated
emphasis, long been established......lol!........could be from a number of civil servant carry-overs in delicate privleged places, too
what punishment would you consider appropriate for those guilty of this foul treason?
hmmmmmmm.....suspend his law license for five years and make him pay $25,000 fine?
in the larger sense, and quite sincerely -- I can't help but wonder if you can possibly be prepared to give your whole view of things an honest reality check if it does turn out that you are dead wrong
i won't be!
Hey zitboy,
Long time no talk to. How's it going?? Still kicking butt on the links?? Cool. I hope your family and you are doing well.
Don't think we have communicated for many months so I was hoping to get an update or two from you as I have always enjoyed your posts.
By the way, great pic of a 'weak' female liberal flipping the bird to...I'm guessing some conservative of some sort. But I digress, so let's catch up.
If I remember correctly, you were a big proponent of invading Iraq (something about a three-legged stool). So tell me, how things going over there??? Funny you should use the words "bring it on!" in your post. Wasn't that what our self-proclaimed 'war president' said to the insurgents/terrorists/dead-enders'???? Oh yeah, that's right, Mr. Dick 'They-Will-Welcome-Us-With-Flowers' Cheney recently said they are 'in the last throes'. Throwing what??
Speaking of war (damn, isn't that a great subject on the 4th???), wasn't it you who scoffed at us wimpy liberals while pontificating on our ability to fight wars on several fronts. Yes, by gum, it was you! Letmeseenow, we are in the big sand trap (I know, I know, you have never been in one) in Iraq, and ahhh, oh yeah, did I read recently (probably some left leaning newspaper that can't be trusted) the Taliban in Afganistan was giving our 16,000 troops (don't take many to kick azz on that front and I won't even mention whatshisname) a bit of a problem...and, oh right (no pun intended), Iran has a newly elected leader (don't you just LOVE democracy?!?) intent on building a nuclear program for peaceful purposes. Now, of course, no card-carryin' chicken-hawk, blustering right-winger would ever buy that crap and guess what, neither would I. So what we gonna do now??? Invade?? Bomb the bastards?? All the while N. Korea thumbs their nose at us as they build more nucs.
Zit, if I was as bright as you (or your fearless leader, Mr. Bush)I guess I would have the answers, but I don't. Ya see, I had this real bad feeling when 9/11 became a mandate for regime change (yes, zit, Saddam was a baaaad man). But Mr. Bush wanted this war in the worst way and after 'mission accomplished' and his draft dodging bravado 'bring it on', he's got it. To make us safer, right?? To fight them 'over there' so we don't have to fight them 'over here' (like a commercial one hears over and over again, I think I got that one down). Well, color me pink, but I damn sure don't feel safer and got a bad feeling the worst is yet to come.
Well, zit, it is a weekend to reflect on all we have and all the sacrifices made by countless others, so I will not belabor the point. Interesting you bring up "Karl Rove and Treason", follow it with 'bring it on!' (how I love that!!!)and then with a picture of Madonna giving the finger. Your point is?? The fact is you don't have a point, just the same old straw man BS warmed over. Fact is we got more terrorists today than before 9/11, better trained and more determined than ever, thanks to Iraq. On 9/12 the whole world (minus a handful of countries) was with us. Those with us now can be counted on one hand (or that middle finger you so love), Bin Laden ('we're gonna smoke him out, dead or alive'), dammit wasn't gonna mention his name, is still doing his thang, we're stuck in Iraq (yeah, that's right, it was a blunder that is now a quagmire)with no good options (well, YOU may be thinking the BOMB)....
Bitter you are, always finding fault with others while the zit on your nose grows faster than Pinocchio's. It is sad to see you have learned nothing the past months, but then, that seems par for the course for your cohorts and you. Plow on, wave the flag and preach the party line or how about this: try unwrapping the flag around you, zit, and think about that soon to be 18 year old of yours...and good luck to us all 'cause we will need it.
F6...a generation from now Bush will be remembered (for many things) as having the opportunity to do SOMETHING about our environment...and did nothing but pay off his cronies. Jon Stewart had a nice clip of Bush in 2000 and now regarding his 'position' that more study was necessary. Sure didn't need more study before going into Iraq.
A Shift to Green
Driven by profit and the opportunity to shape regulations, major corporations are backing stronger measures to reduce global warming
By Miguel Bustillo
Times Staff Writer
June 12, 2005
American corporations are increasingly calling for action on global warming, sensing a business opportunity in cutting greenhouse gases while hoping to shape regulations they believe are inevitable.
Bucking the Bush administration's position that tougher rules would harm the U.S. economy, Fortune 500 companies including General Electric Co., Duke Energy Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. in recent months have championed stronger government measures to reduce industrial releases of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas that scientists have linked to rising temperatures and sea levels.
This shift in corporate thinking was on display at a congressional hearing last week, where executives from large companies including DuPont Co., United Technologies Corp. and Baxter International Inc. described how they were getting an early start on reducing greenhouse gas emissions — something they believe they would be required to do sooner or later.
"People increasingly will believe that greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced and that actions should begin today to prepare for that eventuality," James Rogers, the chairman of power generator Cinergy Corp., told the House Science Committee on Wednesday. Rogers now advocates a national program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The number of companies involved remains small, but it is growing, particularly in the energy sector, and is emerging as a new dynamic in the debate over the future of America's global warming policies. The U.S., the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, was the only major developed nation other than Australia to reject the Kyoto Protocol, an international pact to cut emissions to about 5% below 1990 levels by 2012.
Although their rhetoric is rife with references to protecting planet Earth, some of the corporations acknowledge that their newfound focus on global warming is driven by opportunity for profit. Duke Energy would like to build a new nuclear power plant, a type of electricity generation that does not emit greenhouse gases, for instance, while GE wants to expand sales of wind power turbines and pollution-control equipment.
"We believe we can help improve the environment and make money doing it," GE Chairman Jeffrey Immelt said last month in a speech at George Washington University that attracted widespread notice. "We see that green is green."
Many multinational companies, which already deal with carbon reduction regulations in other parts of the world, believe it's only a matter of time before they will be required in the U.S. Rather than resist the inevitable, they want to help shape new regulations in a way that will give them a competitive advantage.
In addition, some companies fear that in the absence of federal action, many cities and states, which already are proposing their own regulations, will create a hodgepodge of compliance standards across the country.
Those concerns were amplified this month, when California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an executive order that pledges to reduce the state's emissions by more than 80% in the next half-century.
"We don't need a patchwork of inconsistent state or local regulations to complicate and increase the cost of compliance," Duke Energy Chairman Paul Anderson said in an April speech to Charlotte, N.C., business leaders in which he surprised the electric power industry by advocating a federal tax on the carbon content of fossil fuels. "Yet a patchwork is exactly what we are getting, due to federal inaction."
Duke, which has announced plans to acquire Cinergy, formally proposed the levy to President Bush's tax reform panel in April — an approach that critics noted would penalize Duke far less than some competitors in the electricity business that depend more on coal power.
Anderson later said that he did not think such a tax would be approved while Bush was in office.
As more businesses express an openness to greenhouse gas regulations, some politicians are attempting to seize the momentum. That is reflected in a number of amendments to the sweeping energy bill being considered by Congress that offers incentives to business.
Revised legislation by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) to establish firm limits on carbon dioxide exhaust has added hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies for nuclear power and other types of cleaner electricity sources. More companies have expressed interest in the legislation since the subsidies were added, but have stopped short of supporting it.
An amendment by Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) seeks to enact the recommendations of the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan panel of experts from business, government, environmental groups and academia that recommended a less restrictive cap on greenhouse gas emissions than the one proposed in the McCain-Lieberman bill.
"Businesses don't like taxes, and they don't like uncertainty. Right now, they face a future where they will be hit with some kind of regulation on carbon, and a growing number of them are saying, if we take some actions now perhaps we can avoid stronger actions later," said Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.) who has proposed legislation to reduce carbon dioxide along with traditional smog-forming pollutants.
"There is more support for doing something than there was a year ago," Carper said. "Will there be enough to pass one of them? Anybody's guess right now."
The Bush administration, which has pursued an energy policy that heavily promotes fossil fuels, has shown few signs of altering its position on climate change, however.
"Our position is very straightforward: We need to take all aggressive actions within our capabilities, as long as they further our economic growth," said Jim Connaughton, Bush's chief environmental advisor.
Most oil and gas companies, among the president's biggest political benefactors, remain firmly opposed to toughening the administration's existing policies, which promote only voluntary reductions of greenhouse gases.
The American Petroleum Institute has been lobbying against the recommendations of the National Commission on Energy Policy, which also suggested a moderated "cap and trade" system in which companies that reduced more than their share of greenhouse gases would obtain credits they could sell to others.
A similar, less restricted market is already underway in Europe, where a ton of carbon credits was recently valued at $25.
There is also far less momentum for global warming regulations in the House than in the Senate, backers acknowledge, making passage of any legislation unlikely.
"We're not there yet in the House, quite frankly. These businesses are way ahead of us," said Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.), who supports a federal program to reduce greenhouse gases. The Bush administration stance "happens to be wrong," he added, but he expressed optimism that it could change as dissenting businesses become more vocal.
Advisor Connaughton said that the Bush administration opposed hard limits on greenhouse gas emissions because it believed that they would drive up energy prices, forcing manufacturers out of the country and costing hundreds of thousands of Americans their jobs.
He noted that more than 100 companies had pledged to reduce their greenhouse gases under the administration's voluntary Climate Leaders program, including IBM Corp., General Motors Corp. and Johnson & Johnson.
To more and more companies, however, the status quo is not enough.
"American industry leaders are not calling for us to adopt Kyoto, but they are growing increasingly impatient with the voluntary approach," said William K. Reilly, who served as head of the Environmental Protection Agency under President George H.W. Bush and is co-chairman of the National Commission on Energy Policy.
At the heart of the increase in corporate advocacy on global warming is a belief that the U.S. is missing a golden opportunity to cash in on the burgeoning worldwide response to the threat.
Some companies are concerned that the Bush administration's voluntary programs are too weak to encourage expanded use of cleaner technologies such as solar, wind and even nuclear power, compared with the market-based regulations now required nearly everywhere else in the developed world. Japan now leads the world in the development of solar power cells, and Europe is the top producer of wind-power machinery.
Some companies are also concerned that by failing to assert leadership on global warming, the U.S. is allowing the European Union — and a number of states around the country — to dictate how industries are expected to conduct themselves around the world.
California has already passed a law to reduce car and truck emissions of greenhouse gases, and a group of Northeastern states has begun creating its own carbon trading market to cut smokestack exhaust.
The European Union has passed rules to produce 22% of its electricity from renewable energy sources by 2010. Similar laws have been approved by 18 American states, including California.
Other companies are concerned that global warming could affect long-term supplies of natural resources they depend on.
"We think the science is pretty compelling, and it is appropriate to take action now" to reduce global warming, said Helen Howes, vice president for environment, health and safety at Exelon Corp., one of the nation's largest utilities, which participated in the National Commission on Energy Policy. "You have seen thawing in the Arctic, issues of potential rising water levels. For us, because we have a lot of nuclear plants that use a lot of cooling water, we are worried that water supplies may not be as reliable in the future."
Though some corporations are willingly stepping forward with proposals to tackle global warming, others are being dragged into the debate by socially conscious shareholders.
Evangelical and environmental investor groups, as well as state pension fund officials who together control more than $3 trillion in assets, are pushing resolutions at shareholder meetings that seek to compel companies to disclose their financial exposure to global warming regulations.
The resolutions almost never win majority support. But in response to the pressure, many companies are choosing to develop global warming policies to head off continuing confrontations.
Some are even putting pressure on their corporate peers. JPMorgan Chase recently announced that it would ask clients that are large emitters of greenhouse gases to develop reduction plans, following similar commitments by Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. .
"Two years ago, the concept of climate risk was something alien to investors. That's certainly not the case today," said Mindy S. Lubber, the president of Ceres, an organization that compels companies to embrace environmental responsibility. "Investors are raising these issues because they feel that they are affecting the value of companies, and they are raising the issues en masse. It is a good thing because it is promoting a dialogue and discussion."
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-warming12jun12,1,2902241,print.story?coll=la-headlines-busines...
F6....re: "A week after saying that many Republicans "have never made an honest living in their lives," the chairman of the Democratic Party has now called the GOP "pretty much a white Christian party.""
The smellin' o' the green
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate
A jaw-dropping article in The Texas Observer shows that two lobbying clients of Jack Abramoff paid $25,000 to Grover Norquist's group for a lunch date and meeting with President Bush in May 2001.
Abramoff brought the Indian chiefs to the White House at the request of Norquist, a leading "movement conservative" in Washington. In addition, Abramoff obtained $2.5 million in contributions from the Indians for a nonprofit foundation run by his wife and himself.
The White House guests were the chiefs of two of the six casino-rich Indian tribes represented by Abramoff and his partner Michael Scanlon, former top aide to House Majority Whip Tom DeLay. The $25,000 check from the Coushatta tribe of Louisiana is made out to Americans for Tax Reform, an anti-tax group founded and directed by Norquist.
Norquist, Abramoff and Karl Rove have worked together for 30 years, since they were national leaders of the College Republicans. Norquist, DeLay and Abramoff are all key players in the "the K Street Project" to turn the Washington lobby corps into an arm of the Republican Party.
(Obligatory disclosure: The Observer's story, "The Pimping of the President," is by Lou Dubose, a free-lance writer with whom I have written two books and am working on a third. However, Dubose has never had anything to do with my newspaper column, nor am I involved with any of his journalism. Another reporter who deserves credit on this story is Shawn Martin of Louisiana's Lake Charles American Press, who has followed it from the end of the local Indian tribe.)
The Observer story comes after a year of denials from the tribe (or at least the majority on the tribal council and their lawyer, Kent Hance, a major player in Texas Republican circles and a former state officeholder).
Dubose reports: "According to a source close to the tribal majority, Chairman Poncho recently 'revisited that issue' of his visit to the White House. He had previously denied it because he thought he was responding to press inquiries that implied he had a one-on-one meeting with Bush. He now recalls that he did in fact go to the White House on May 9, 2001. … That meeting lasted for about 15 minutes and was not a one-on-one meeting. … Abramoff was at the meeting."
According to the new version, "Bush made some general comments about Indian policy but did not discuss Indian gaming," Dubose wrote. Abramoff billed the Coushattas $25,000 for the meeting.
"Norquist has not responded to inquiries about using the White House as a fund-raiser. It is, however, a regular ATR practice to invite state legislators and tribal leaders who have supported ATR anti-tax initiatives to the White House for a personal thank-you from the president," Dubose reported. "A source at ATR said no money is ever accepted from participants in these events. The $25,000 check from the Coushattas suggests that, at least in this instance, Norquist's organization made an exception. The $75,000 collected from the Mississippi Choctaws and two corporate sponsors mentioned in Abramoff's e-mail suggests there were other exceptions. Norquist recently wrote to the tribes who paid to attend White House meetings. His story regarding that event is also evolving."
Norquist now says the contributions were in no way related to any White House event. "That doesn't square with the paper trail Abramoff and Norquist left behind, which makes it evident they were selling access to the president," Dubose writes.
For an overview of the entire Abramoff scandal and its relation to DeLay and the K Street Project -- and what all this means in terms of Washington sleaze -- see an article by Elizabeth Drew, "Selling Washington," in the June 23 edition of The New York Review of Books. Drew and other students of Washington corruption conclude that what we have here is not so much a difference in kind as in degree of corruption -- but of a degree that's making a difference in everything.
Drew writes: "The effects of the new, higher level of corruption on the way the country is governed are profound. Not only is legislation increasingly skewed to benefit the richest interests, but Congress itself has been changed. The head of a public policy strategy group told me: 'It's not about governing anymore. The Congress is now a transactional institution. …' The theory that ours is a system of one-person, one-vote, or even that it's a representative democracy, is challenged by the reality of power and who really wields it."
I doubt there is a more important story in this country today. All reporters who want to be the next Woodward and Bernstein should follow Dubose and Martin to the local ends of this story.
http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/columnists/molly_ivins/11852126.htm
Amy, good post. Hope all is well with everyone!!! Galloway ate them alive...hard to argue with someone calling a spade a spade as Coleman found out.
http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/002119.html
F6, thanks for the article. Pretty amazing the structural integrity of these subs when considering the damage caused.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/harry-shearer/found-object-we-coach-y_1182.html
American policy, courtesy of Beavis & Co.
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate
AUSTIN - When the history of this administration is written, I suspect the largest black mark against it will be wasting time.
The energy bill just passed by the House is a classic example of frittering away precious time and resources by doing exactly nothing that needs to be done about energy. The bill gives $8.1 billion in new tax breaks to the oil companies, which are already swimming in cash.
Exxon Mobil's profits are up 44 percent, Royal Dutch/Shell up 42 percent, etc. According to the business pages, the biggest problem that oil executives face is what to do with all their cash. So why give more tax breaks to the oil companies?
Makes as much sense as anything else in this energy bill. Nothing about conservation, higher fuel efficiency standards or putting money into renewable energy sources. It's so stupid that it's painful.
And their genius answer to "energy independence"? Drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Look, the total oil under ANWR is 1 billion barrels less than this country uses in a year, according to Robert Bryce, a Texas journalist who specializes in energy reporting.
The bill is just riddled with perversity: We continue to subsidize people who buy Hummers but no longer grant tax rebates to those who buy hybrid cars that are more than six times as fuel-efficient. This is not how you get to "energy independence." The United States hit its oil peak back in 1970. Domestic production has been declining ever since.
I'm not sure I've ever seen anything quite as odd as the right wing's insistence that global warming does not exist. I'm not a climatologist, but I can read what they're saying. In fact, they're screaming it. Rush Limbaugh is not a climatologist, either; nor are any of the rest of these pinheads who seem to think the whole thing is some figment of liberals' imagination.
There's nothing liberal about global warming. It's science. There seems to be some element of childish spite in the refusal to recognize it -- "Boy, we can drive the liberals crazy by pretending it's not happening, ha-ha-ha."
If you read right-wing blogs, you find a kind of Beavis-and-Butt-Head attitude about the subject, a sort of adolescent-jerk humor. What's astonishing is finding the same attitude among members of Congress. Head-militantly-in-sand is not a solution.
There is a perfect convergence of economic, environmental and energy considerations that all point in the same direction: renewable energy sources.
With demand for gasoline soaring worldwide, with the economies of both China and India growing at staggering paces, with the world somewhere near its oil peak now, our dependence on some of the world's most retrograde regimes is only going to get worse and more expensive.
Foreign policy also plays a role here. Let us pass quickly by the administration's pre-war assurances that Iraqi oil would pay for the war. The country is pumping less now than it did under Saddam Hussein.
How smart is it to mess around trying to oust the president of Venezuela? You put a bunch of ideological nut cases in charge of Latin American policy, and you're going to create a lot of enemies down there.
And their answer is to bring back nuclear power? Let's review the bidding on that one. Aside from Murphy's Law, the problem with nukes is that they create radioactive waste that remains toxic for tens of thousands of years. And we don't know what to do with it.
The First Rule of Holes applies: If you're stuck in one, stop digging. We're already dependent on one form of energy that has a toxic legacy; why in heaven's name walk into another one, this time with foreknowledge of its effects? Especially when there are cheap, reliable, renewable, non-poison-producing alternatives?
We're nuts to even think about it. Wind power already has near-competitive prices.
Renewable energy sources are not pie-in-the-sky -- they're here right now, and they're going to be a lot cheaper than oil.
The single cheapest thing we can do about oil is not use so much of it. Current hybrid technology will not get us to the mythical goal of "energy independence," but at least we can slow down the demand for oil. In theory, it only takes 15 years to replace the entire fleet of American cars now on the road. We don't have another four years to waste.
American energy policy -- written by Beavis and Butt-Head.
http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/columnists/molly_ivins/11595656.htm
Jesus Was No GOP Lobbyist
A tortured version of his message is being marketed for political gain.
By Jack Hitt, Jack Hitt is the author of "Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim's Route Into Spain" (Simon & Schuster, 2005).
What would Jesus filibuster? The question is bizarre, of course, but the fact that many prominent religious and political leaders believe that there is an answer surely marks our time as pretty strange.
How quickly it has all happened — that the media, particularly television, has convinced itself that Christianity is little more than a Republican political action committee. When the pope died, CNN's Wolf Blitzer introduced former Clinton aide Paul Begala and right-wing pundit Robert Novak this way: "Bob is a good Catholic; I'm not so sure about Paul Begala." At the bottom of the screen, CNN ran an informative factoid for the audience: "Many Catholic doctrines are conservative."
Broadcast media prefer to cast Christianity in the role of "right-wing values PAC" because it's so neat and tidy. They don't much like even to say the name Jesus on air because then we might have to talk about his ideas. "Evangelical Christianity" is much simpler because you can treat it as just another special-interest group, like the Teamsters or the neocons.
Leaders such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and James Dobson have used the media to redefine Christianity as the "Republican base" — all between commercials hawking family-values videotapes or pleading for more contributions.
Gosh, WWJD? It makes me wax nostalgic for the days when people wore those bracelets and asked the question, "What would Jesus do?" At least people said his name then and pondered his ideas, using the question as the beginning of an engaged moral debate. Few would have appreciated those bracelets as much as the man himself — Jesus, who preached a new way of thinking about religion. Instead of taking orders from temple chieftains, Jesus provoked his followers into thinking for themselves. His preferred media outlet? A literary genre called the parable. It's a style of Q&A wherein the teacher doesn't give the answer but challenges the listener with a half-finished story that forces him to think through to the answer by himself. The radical right has swapped out this genius preacher for some easy listening. They insist that everything will be fine if we just nail the Ten Commandments above every courthouse.
Curious. Jesus updated the Ten Commandments in his most famous speech, the Sermon on the Mount. In it, one finds the Eight Beatitudes. Why don't we ever hear about nailing those somewhere? Here's why: It's not simply the law in the Ten Commandments that attracts fundamentalists. Rather, it's the syntax. The authoritarianism of so many "Thou Shalt Nots."
The syntax of Jesus' Eight Beatitudes is not so easy (Blessed are the poor in spirit…. Blessed are the peacemakers). These words invite the kind of hard questions that Jesus loved to tweak his followers with. How are they blessed? And why? It's just like Jesus to leave us with questions instead of answers.
The Jesus who speaks in the Gospels is nothing like the fuming Republican Jesus I see on TV now. Jesus was a leader who understood that ambiguity and doubt are not to be feared but are, simply, facts of life that a great teacher exploits to guide his followers on their own paths toward conviction and belief.
Here is a quote from Jesus that you almost never hear: "What do you think?" It's right there in the Bible. Jesus asks this question all the time.
One parable Jesus taught was this one, from Matthew: "What do you think? A man had two sons. And he went to the first and said, 'Son, go and work in the vineyard today.' And he answered, 'I will not,' but afterward he changed his mind and went. And he went to the other son and said the same. And he answered, 'I go, sir,' but did not go." Jesus' disciples all strenuously raised their hands. They knew the answer! The first son was the most virtuous!
Whereupon Jesus (whose sense of humor is underrated) replied: "Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you."
What does that parable mean? Frankly, I am not sure. I have my own thoughts, but they all feel tentative, and I can only hope I'm right. Jesus doesn't accuse his disciples of being wrong; he just mocks the easiness of their quick answer.
Taken as a whole, it's not a parable with a clear and right answer. None of them are, and that is the point. You have to sort of toss it around in your head, think about people you've dealt with who've said one thing and done another, and then try to come to some answer. Chances are that few will agree in their interpretations, an outcome that is rhetorically so sly. Jesus makes you work through your own doubt and hesitation to arrive at an answer that becomes the very foundation of your own certainty.
This guy's good, isn't he?
But that Jesus is nowhere to be found on our televisions or in our newsweeklies. Ironically, mass-market Christians rarely cite or emphasize the living Jesus, the Jesus who speaks. They like their Christ dead. Or nearly dead, as in Mel Gibson's movie. In that film, the entire Sermon on the Mount — the most important words Jesus spoke — is relegated to a few seconds of flashback.
Yet the living Jesus always finds a way of getting past the money-changers, doesn't he? Every generation produces a Jesus to suit its own purposes. How fitting that in the Age of Information our broadcasters have marketed a Jesus so narrowly defined that he resembles little more than a lobbyist loitering outside Tom DeLay's office hoping for a few minutes of the great man's time.
But these people always underestimate the actual words that Jesus spoke. They are right there in the Gospels for those willing to hear Jesus, rather than rely upon videotape salesmen to re-interpret him as a furious political hack. The living Jesus will come again. It's the other meaning of being reborn.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-hitt26apr26,1,736155.story
Politician to the People. A Review of the Documentary "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"
Wednesday, Oct 29, 2003 Print format
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By: Melissa Levine
In 1998, a passionate majority of Venezuelans elected a new president. His name was Hugo Chavez, and he was the first leader in generations to come from outside the ruling class. He vowed to redistribute Venezuela's oil wealth and to involve the people intimately in the political process. Openly comparing his populist movement to that of Simon Bolivar, he encouraged literacy, enfranchised many thousands of working poor, decried globalization, and promised to liberate his country of the "free-market policies imposed on Venezuela by the United States."
Oops.
In the fast-paced, riveting, and affecting documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, directors Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain set up shop in Venezuela to "get behind the layers of myth and rumor" surrounding Chavez' presidency. With nearly unlimited access to the presidential palace, they trace his administration from the early days of jubilant rallies and heartfelt handshakes to the shocking coup d’état that ousted the leader from power for two tense days in April 2002 -- and, in a breathtaking display of popular will, through the revolution that brought him back. The directors could not have anticipated this level of drama, but they immediately commit to it, placing themselves in harm's way to record a view from inside that is otherwise uncovered. As a result, the film cuts to the quick.
Chavez is a warm, charismatic man whose demeanor invites connection with the people of his country. He's also gifted at straight talk, giving authentic, unscripted speeches and communicating directly with the people via a weekly call-in television show. Compared with the steel-jawed opposition leaders and oil millionaires, who demonstrably lie through their teeth, Chavez is a savior, a leader who trusts the people, communicates with them, and holds himself accountable to his promises to them.
Meanwhile, Chavez' platform rankles the rich. First, he announces that he wants to distribute the country's oil wealth among the entire populace -- that is, not just the wealthy 20 percent but the 80 percent of the population that is Venezuela's poor. Then, after September 11, Chavez expresses concern that the US military action in Afghanistan occasionally misses its targets. He holds up a photo of dead Afghan children and explains, with genuine sorrow, that they were bombed while eating a meal with their parents. "Yes, let's find the terrorists," he says, "but let's not have a carte blanche to do anything. You cannot fight terror with terror. We demand that you think before you act."
Uh-oh. As the world's fourth-largest exporter of oil, Venezuela had long been a comfortable, worry-free supplier to the United States. Before Chavez, we had exactly the kind of relationship that Washington seeks and, you know, occasionally "ensures" with oil suppliers. So what are we to think when, on April 11, 2002, the Venezuelan military suddenly and illegally reroutes an anti-Chavez demonstration to the presidential palace, forces a violent conflict with pro-Chavez supporters, surrounds the palace, takes Chavez into custody, and erects a new government, all within 24 hours?
I'm going to hazard a guess here: The United States was involved. The film lets the events do the talking, but the evidence is loud, clear, and damning. The coup came about only after the two major opposition leaders visited officials here, and the man who assumed the presidency was Pedro Carmona, head of the board that manages Venezuela's oil. Meanwhile, while Chavez was held captive on an unidentified island, a mysterious airplane appeared to cart him off to another country, presumably to render him unable to reassume power. In what country was that plane registered? Here's a hint: You're living in it.
I'm no mathematician, but as an American who takes in the news once every couple of weeks, I feel pretty comfortable with the following equation: oil-rich country + populist leader who resists globalization and redistributes wealth = US intervention. It's lucky for Venezuela the Bush administration couldn't even try to claim that Chavez had WMDs, though of course Bush had just unloaded some serious artillery in another part of the world. It appears that he had bigger fish to shock and awe.
With a plot so thick, sometimes it's hard to believe that this is a documentary and not a scripted drama. (Would that it were.) The action is constant: first a rally, as vast crowds pack the streets to cheer for Chavez; then demonstrations of another kind, with rich Venezuelans frightened of losing their wealth organizing against the leader. (With a comic lack of perspective, one member of the upper class claims that the poor have not struggled as she has.) A military occupation of the palace is soon followed by a standoff with the president. Finally, the film builds to a truly moving demonstration in which uncounted thousands of citizens brave gun violence to rally for the ousted Chavez. It's a remarkable display of activism.
What's more, the film is an object lesson in the politics of television. Immediately after the coup, Chavez' ministers struggle to deliver a message to the people, but the only station available to them -- the state station -- has had its signal cut. All other stations, owned by the oil oligarchy that opposes Chavez, broadcast lies. Even CNN (ah, CNN, you unsacred cow) broadcasts propaganda, offering an interview with Carmona in which he claims to retain power. Amazingly, even without televised assurance of who has control of the palace, the people of Venezuela take to the streets and demand their leader back. They don't care about what's on TV. They just want the truth, and they'll risk life and limb to get it.
This revolution may not have been televised, but it was filmed, and it is a glorious thing.
Originally published on October 29, 2003 at eastbayexpress.com
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1045
INNOCENCE LOST: THE HIDDEN CASUALTIES OF THE IRAQ WAR
CHILDREN OF THE FALLEN
Nearly 900 children have lost a parent in Iraq
By LISA HOFFMAN and ANNETTE RAINVILLE
Scripps Howard News Service
December 15, 2004
Sad to the depths of his 4-year-old soul, Jack Shanaberger knew what he didn't want to be when he grows up: a father.
"I don't want to be a daddy because daddies die," the child solemnly told his mother after his father, Staff Sgt. Wentz "Baron" Shanaberger, a military policeman from Fort Pierce, Fla., was killed March 23 in an ambush in Iraq.
Surrounded by family members, Corey Shanaberger holds her daughter Grace, 3, during her husband's funeral. Sgt. First Class Wentz "Baron" Shanaberger was killed in Iraq in an ambush, leaving behind his wife and five children. (SHNS photo by Brendan Fitterer / St. Petersburg Times)
On that terrible day, Jack and his four siblings joined the ranks of the largely overlooked American casualties who, until now, have gone uncounted. Although almost daily official announcements tally the war dead, the collateral damage to the children left behind has not been detailed.
But, from Defense Department casualty reports, obituaries and accounts in hometown newspapers, and family interviews, Scripps Howard News Service has identified nearly 900 U.S. children who have lost a parent in the war, from the start of the conflict in March 2003 through November, when a total of 1,256 troops had died.
Although comparably specific historical data is not available for other U.S. wars, military experts said the proportionally higher number of American children left bereaved by the Iraq war is unprecedented.
"This is a new state of affairs we have to confront," said Charles Moskos, a leading military sociologist and Northwestern University professor.
Overall, Americans in uniform today are far more likely to be married and have children than in the military of the past, Moskos and others said. And the reliance in Iraq on reserve forces _ who tend to be older and even more settled than active-duty soldiers _ also means more offspring at home.
Even though the federal government provides an array of benefits for widows, widowers and minor children, more help is needed _ including counseling _ for at least 882 American children left without a parent from the war in Iraq.
"As much as we are concerned about veterans' programs, we now have to be concerned about orphan programs," Moskos said. "This is the first time we have crossed this threshold." PROFILES
According to the Scripps research, more than 40 percent of the 1,256 war dead through November were married, and 429 had children. At least half of those youngsters were 10 years old or younger. Among the parents who died were six women soldiers who had borne a total of 10 children among them _ another historic first for females in the U.S. military.
Perhaps most heartbreaking are the more than 40 troops who died without ever seeing their children. At least 34 wives were pregnant _ four with twins _ when their husbands died, and another15 had babies while their spouses were deployed. While some of the latter were able to return home on paternity leave, most died before they could.
Among those who never once held their babies was Army 1st Lt. Doyle Hufstedler, 25, of Abilene, Texas, who was killed in March when a roadside bomb hit his armored personnel carrier near Habbaniyah. In his uniform pocket, Hufstedler carried a sonogram picture of his unborn daughter, the only image he would ever have of Grace Ashley, who arrived six weeks after his death.
Leslie Hufstedler's husband Doyle died in April, one month before his daughter Gracy was born. Here Leslie and 5-month-old Gracy share a moment at Leslie's parents home in Charlotte, N.C. (SHNS photo by Layne Bailey / Charlotte Observer)
Ursula Pirtle gave birth to Katie, her husband's first-born and spitting image, 27 days after Army Spc. James Heath Pirtle, 27, of La Mesa, N.M., was killed Oct. 3, 2003, in an insurgent attack north of Baghdad.
"It's almost hard to look at her sometimes," Ursula Pirtle, who now lives in Harker Heights, Texas, wrote in a posthumous online letter to her husband. "I would give my right arm to get a chance to see you two together ... I know she would be the biggest joy you've ever known."
Despite their losses, Pirtle and most other surviving spouses say they still support the war. They say they are profoundly proud of their loved ones' willingness to give their lives for their country and to help bring democracy to Iraq. That pride helps their children cope as well.
At 50 children per school bus, it would take more than 17 busses to hold the nearly 900 children who have lost a parent to the Iraq War. (SHNS graphic by George Sterling)
Virginia Collier, of Harrison, Ark., found great solace in her husband's undimmed belief that the Iraq war was not only justified, but also engendering more good than the media has portrayed. A father of four, her husband, Army National Guard Sgt. Russell Collier, 48, was killed Oct. 3 trying to help a fellow soldier under fire in Taji, Iraq.
The pregnant wife of 1st Lt. Doyle M. Hufstedler III, Leslie Hufstedler, second from left, is consoled by family during a graveside ceremony in Abilene, Texas, on April 9, 2004. (SHNS photo by Josie Liming/ Abilene Reporter-News)
"He died doing what he loved," Veronica Collier told a local newspaper.
By all accounts, children also bring a measure of comfort to the bereaved spouses and other relatives, providing a tangible link to the parent who is gone. Hufstedler's widow, Leslie, said her daughter is a perpetual prod to get on with life.
Now sharing a home with her parents in Charlotte, N.C., Hufstedler, 25, said she dreads the coming Christmas season, which would have been the first for her brand new family, but she has resolved to celebrate for Grace's sake.
In Hinesville, Ga., Denise Marshall also expects a sad Christmas, a holiday for which her husband, Army Sgt. 1st Class Robert Marshall, once handled the biggest decorating chores.
That is the least of the new widow's problems. Since Marshall, 50, was killed in a rocket-propelled gun attack in April 2003, his wife has struggled financially and otherwise to care for their three children, all of whom have medical disabilities. The trio are getting counseling to help with their loss, but the emotional wound remains fresh.
More than a year after his father's passing, Marshall's son, Richard, 16, still has a hard time sleeping. Once, his mother said, Richard asked her, "Did Dad love his soldiers more than he loved us?"
The fierce love many fallen soldiers had for their children is evident in both the reasons they joined the service and in letters and e-mails they sent home.
Pfc. Stephen Downing, 30, of Burkesville, Ky., gave up his truck-driving job to join the Army to provide a better life for his children, Taylor, 9, and Stephen, 5.
"His kids were everything in the world for him," Downing's ex-wife, LeAnn Emmons, told a local newspaper.
A man with a soft spot for all children, Downing _ killed Oct. 28 by a sniper in Ramadi _ told his family he would also be fighting for the children of Iraq. "He told his kids that he wanted Iraqi kids to have the same opportunities (American) kids do," Emmons said.
It was his own bottomless love for his wife and two daughters that gave rise to the worst fear for Army Chief Warrant Officer William Brennan, an Army helicopter pilot killed in a crash Oct. 16 on a mission to protect Iraqi civilians fleeing under fire from insurgents.
"It's not the fear of death that wears me down. It is the feeling of not being there for my three girls," Brennan, 36, of Bethlehem, Conn., wrote in an Easter letter to his sister. Only 2 years old when his own father died, Brennan worried that, if he were killed, his children "would never know me."
The Army Honor Guard from Fort Stewart, Georgia carries the casket out of Coleman and Ferguson Funeral home in Dade City following an emotional service for Sergeant First Class Wentz "Baron" Shanaberger. (SHNS photo by Brendan Fitterer / St. Petersburg Times)
Corey Shanaberger, widow of the Florida MP killed in March, is doing everything she can so her children will remember their father in both life and death. Baron Shanaberger left instructions that, if he died, his five kids should be permitted to see him in his coffin, believing that would help them come to terms with his passing and provide them some closure.
At the funeral home viewing, Jack and his twin sister, Grace, climbed up so they could touch and kiss him in his open casket. The children placed precious mementos in the coffin with him _ a little red truck, a stuffed puppy dog, a favorite doll, a photo.
Now, each night when the stars are out, Corey Shanaberger tells her children that one star is their daddy coming out of heaven to watch over them. They all blow a kiss to the sky.
"I always tell my children, 'You might forget what your daddy looked like but always remember what he felt like'," she said. "Always remember his hugs, always remember his kisses, and always remember his love."
(Reach Lisa Hoffman at hoffmanl(at)shns.com)
http://www.shns.com/shns/warkids/
Hey zit, since you like to hear yourself talk, how things goin' in Iraq. Care to comment on that three-legged stool of yours? Ain't plantin' democracy by gunpoint in that sandy hellhole just grand?
Families Pay the Price
By BOB HERBERT
Published: December 24, 2004
t's like watching your son playing in traffic, and there's nothing you can do." - Janet Bellows, mother of a soldier who has been assigned to a second tour in Iraq.
Back in the 1960's, when it seemed as if every other draftee in the Army was being sent to Vietnam, I was sent off to Korea, where I was assigned to the intelligence office of an engineer battalion.
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Twenty years old and half a world away from home, I looked forward to mail call the way junkies craved their next fix. My teenage sister, Sandy, got all of her high school girlfriends to write to me, which led some of the guys in my unit to think I was some kind of Don Juan. I considered it impolite to correct any misconceptions they might have had.
You could depend on the mail for an emotional lift - most of the time. But there were times when I would open an envelope and read, in the inky handwriting of my mother or father or sister, that a friend of mine, someone I had grown up with or gone to school with, or a new friend I had met in the Army, had been killed in Vietnam. Just like that. Gone. Life over at 18, 19, 20.
I can still remember the weird feelings that would come over me in those surreal moments, including the irrational idea that I was somehow responsible for the death. In the twisted logic of grief, I would feel that if I had never opened the envelope, the person would still be alive. I remember being overwhelmed with the desire to reseal the letter in the envelope and bring my dead friend back to life.
This week's hideous attack in Mosul reminded me of those long ago days. Once again American troops sent on a fool's errand are coming home in coffins, or without their right arms or left legs, or paralyzed, or so messed up mentally they'll never be the same. Troops are being shoved two or three times into the furnace of Iraq by astonishingly incompetent leaders who have been unable or unwilling to provide them with the proper training, adequate equipment or even a clearly defined mission.
It is a mind-boggling tragedy. And the suffering goes far beyond the men and women targeted by the insurgents. Each death in Iraq blows a hole in a family and sets off concentric circles of grief that touch everyone else who knew and cared for the fallen soldier. If the human stakes were understood well enough by the political leaders of this country, it might make them a little more reluctant to launch foolish, unnecessary and ultimately unwinnable wars.
Lisa Hoffman and Annette Rainville of the Scripps Howard News Service have reported, in an extremely moving article, that nearly 900 American children have lost a parent to the war in Iraq. More than 40 fathers died without seeing their babies.
The article begins with a description of a deeply sad 4-year-old named Jack Shanaberger, whose father was killed in an ambush in March. Jack told his mother he didn't want to be a father when he grew up. "I don't want to be a daddy," he said, "because daddies die."
Six female soldiers who died in the war left a total of 10 children. This is a new form of wartime heartbreak for the U.S.
We have completely lost our way with this fiasco in Iraq. The president seems almost perversely out of touch. "The idea of democracy taking hold in what was a place of tyranny and hatred and destruction is such a hopeful moment in the history of the world," he said this week.
The truth, of course, is that we can't even secure the road to the Baghdad airport, or protect our own troops lining up for lunch inside a military compound. The coming elections are a slapstick version of democracy. International observers won't even go to Iraq to monitor the elections because it's too dangerous. They'll be watching, as if through binoculars, from Jordan.
Nobody has a plan. We don't have enough troops to secure the country, and the Iraqi forces have shown neither the strength nor the will to do it themselves. Election officials are being murdered in the streets. The insurgency is growing in both strength and sophistication. At least three more marines and one soldier were killed yesterday, ensuring the grimmest of holidays for their families and loved ones.
One of the things that President Bush might consider while on his current vacation is whether there are any limits to the price our troops should be prepared to pay for his misadventure in Iraq, or whether the suffering and dying will simply go on indefinitely.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/24/opinion/24herbert.html?oref=login&n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials....
Merry Christmas, Rooster.
I'm looking forward to an IDCC 2005!!!!
and you're a putz for constantly loading that audio crap in your posts, but then again, since you have little to say and say so much....
Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday's to all!!!!
And F6, great job monitoring this board!! Maybe as a New Year's present Matt will open this board to all...
F6, I have to give credit to DannyDetail on this when he extolled the virtues of Donaldson. When he was appointed I commented to DD it was the fox watching the chicken coop. Well, it appears he has had investors best interest at heart. But, of course, now the pressure is on to change that. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds.
Business groups are pressing for the Bush administration to shake things up at the SEC by installing someone at the helm that is more sympathetic to their cause - a move that could potentially undo at least some of the corporate reform that has taken place in recent years.
LOL, F6, all is well. Disappointed we have Bush another 4 years, but of all the silver linings, the one I will enjoy the most is this: All Georgie's life he has gotten into messes and had daddy, daddy's money or daddy's friends and money bail him out. Well, he got himself (and sadly, us) into a fine mess and this time he has got nobody to bail him out. Damn shame what is going on over there. More terrorist's than ever, thanks to poor planning they are now better armed than ever, but hey, Ashcroft did his job and we are safer than ever. Go figure. Arafat is giving Bush another chance to do something positive (if the whole place doesn't blow first) and I hope the pressure of 'his legacy' causes him to think a little deeper than has been so far demonstrated.
Two Marine Corps Buddies Inseparable in Life, Death
By Mark Arax, Times Staff Writer
CLOVIS, Calif. — Growing up in the San Joaquin Valley, where so many dreams are hemmed in by the fields, Jeremiah Baro and Jared Hubbard had the good fortune of being suburban boys. Their fathers weren't farmworkers following the crops, but a loan officer and a cop who expected even more for their sons.
But when they graduated from high school three years ago, the standout wrestler and the football star seemed unsure what to do next. This much was certain, family and friends said: Wherever one would go, the other would follow.
In the months after Sept. 11, 2001, they headed to Camp Pendleton as part of the Marine Corps buddy program. When Baro, 21, decided to try out for an elite sniper unit, Hubbard, 22, stood beside him. It was Jeremiah and Jared, sharpshooter and spotter, right up to the day last week when they set out on a mission west of Baghdad.
In the early morning darkness of Nov. 4, as their families were still sorting out the presidential election back home, the two young men, on their second tour of duty, were struck by a hidden bomb detonated by an Iraqi insurgent. It must have hit just so, because of the eight Marines walking along both sides of the road, only two — Baro and Hubbard — were killed.
On Thursday, as the nation observed Veterans Day, the two hometown boys were buried side by side in a cemetery just down the road from where they grew up in this old rodeo town.
Once grammar school rivals on the wrestling mat, they had become best friends who, on the eve of battle, made a pact to watch each other's back.
"I don't think Jeremiah would have made it if he had lived and Jared had died. I think the guilt would have killed him," said his aunt, Marissa Baro-Garabito. "One couldn't have come back without the other. So they came back together."
The war in Iraq, which seemed so distant a week ago, had come home. With tiny U.S. flags lining the quaint streets of old town and red, white and blue ribbons tied around elm trees that marked the path to the funeral chapel where two coffins rested in a rose-colored light, the war came home. With a disbelieving mother reaching past the perfect uniform to feel the wounds herself and a girlfriend picking out a letter from keepsakes in a shoebox — a last letter that spoke of marriage and a full life after the war — it came home.
"My love, things right here in Ramadi are a lot different than when I was in Iraq the first time. The mood of the people is very bad. It seems like everyone hates us out here," Baro wrote to Stephine Sanchez. (My bold) "I went out on a mission last night and I was on a rooftop. I looked directly straight up and I saw our star. Do you remember our star?"
Baro and Hubbard became the sixth and seventh service members from this rich agricultural belt in the middle of California to die in the war. Just a few days before, three Marines in dress uniform had walked into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Lemoore and told a mother that her 20-year-old son, Lance Cpl. Jeremy D. Bow, had been killed outside Fallouja.
Jeff Hubbard, who retired from the Clovis Police Department after 30 years, read of that death in the local newspaper, and the war drew even nearer. Still, he and his wife, Peggy, didn't believe it could happen to their son. Each of their four children was precious, he said, but it was Jared who made him feel especially connected to his own father, Robert, a rugged, lightning-quick athlete at Clovis High in the 1940s who went on to become a beloved coach. Jared had his grandfather's strength and speed.
"I remember when he was just a 60-pound kid and he would grab kids 20 or 30 pounds heavier and just lift them up," Jeff Hubbard said. "He was strong. But it wasn't a recipe for him being a bully. He had a deep feeling for the underdog."
It seemed only yesterday that he was coaching 11-year-old Jared and the rest of the Garfield Cubs. That's when his son met two of his best friends, Brandon Sanchez and Bennie Clay.
"What I'll never forget is Jared's smile," Clay said. "In every photo I've got of him, he's smiling from ear to ear. He was tough but he was sweet too."
In the seventh grade at Alta Sierra Junior High, that tight circle grew to add one more, Jeremiah Baro. His parents, Bert and Terry, had come from the Bay Area when Jeremiah — nicknamed Boogie because he never stopped moving — was 8 years old. Clovis was the perfect little place. Surrounded by vineyards and fruit orchards on the other side of Fresno, it was a growing town with one of the finest school systems in the West. The campuses sprawled with new classrooms and state-of-the-art athletic facilities. The high schools boasted some of the best wrestling, baseball and football teams in California. On Friday nights, the cannon at Lamonica Stadium boomed with every Clovis touchdown.
Jeremiah didn't play football, but his friendship with Jared grew strong during that first wrestling season. The two boys were far from carbon copies. Jared traced his roots to Oklahoma and Arkansas. Jeremiah was part Spanish and part Filipino. Jared was taller and more laid-back. Jeremiah was short, all fire.
"I guess he took after me," said Bert Baro, who is built like a pit bull. "He would not go out looking for trouble, but he was not about to back down if it found him. Jared was more cool. They complemented each other perfectly."
Both boys had their hellion sides, patches of drinking and fighting, but it was Jeremiah who seemed to get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, friends and teachers said.
At a state wrestling tournament in Stockton, he and several other boys, most of them sophomores at Buchanan High School, had sneaked out of their hotel room and bought five six-packs of beer. When coaches discovered the cache, they were kicked off the team and sent to a continuation school. Two years later, back at Buchanan, Jeremiah was caught with some pills at a football game and sent off again. A tenacious 125-pound wrestler, he never got to compete his senior year.
Jared, on the other hand, had some kind of luck, friends and teammates said. At a high school beer party, he got into a fight, boxing gloves and all, with a cross-town rival. When the Clovis police arrived, several students got in trouble, but not Jared. Being Sgt. Hubbard's son had its upside.
As it turned out, his senior year in football was the most memorable in school history. The Buchanan Bears, with Jared anchoring the defensive line, won the valley championship and came within a touchdown of beating the No. 1-ranked team in the country, De La Salle High of Concord. Jared was only 5 feet 8 and 165 pounds but he was so quick that 280-pound opponents, already headed to big-time colleges, could not handle him.
"Jared Hubbard was one of those kids I will never forget," said his line coach, Shawn Murray, who called him Hub-a-Dub. "He was a good student and worked hard at everything he did. As an athlete, he wasn't the most gifted, but no one had more determination. He was a kid I would love to have as son."
By the end of that year, Jeremiah had worked his way back on campus so that he could graduate with Jared. He seemed to have turned a corner, family and friends said. More and more, he talked about following the footsteps of his father's brother, a former Marine. Even before watching the twin towers of the World Trade Center come down that September, Jeremiah had made up his mind.
"He was at that stage in life where he has to make the choice of what to do. It doesn't matter what I want him to do. It's what he wants to do," his father said. "Nobody wants war. But you either make a stand or you run. If you don't stop the terrorists where they breed, they'll be here."
Jared had just finished another summer as a lifeguard for poor minority children in Fresno. He had signed up for the local junior college, but his heart wasn't it in. One day, standing in the kitchen of the family's two-story custom house, he broached the idea of signing up for the Marines and joining Jeremiah.
His father, a warm, engaging man, had rarely played hard-nosed cop with his children. Even when Jared came home with his tongue and an eyebrow pierced his sophomore year, the displeasure he expressed was a quiet one. This time, as Jared described feeling adrift, his father and mother cautioned him. Take the military test and see how you score, they told him. If you score high, you can enter as an officer. No need to go in as a front-line infantryman.
He ended up acing the exam but still insisted on the infantry.
"He wanted to go in with Jeremiah," his mother said. "He was adamant about doing infantry."
After they went through boot camp as official "buddies," the Marine Corps put them in different units in Iraq. During the March 2003 invasion and the months that followed, they saw each other only a few times. Jeremiah's squad ran into trouble. The soldiers were having a hard time discerning soldiers from civilians. So they decided to shoot at everything that moved, according to their letters home. It got so bad that their commander took away their explosives.
"It's pretty crazy," Jared wrote to Murray, his former football coach. "During our ride to Baghdad, my bud and I have our machine guns out the top. Bullets going over our heads, the rest of the squad tugging my leg asking what's going on. Couldn't see a damn thing because it was so green and thick. Like Nam. We fought for 2 1/2 hours. We killed them all."
They came home in late summer 2003 and took a long break. Jeremiah recorded his own rap songs on two compact discs but otherwise couldn't sit still. Something was burning in him. He told his fiancee, Stephine Sanchez, and his parents that he wanted in the worst way to go to sniper school. And he wanted his best pal to go with him. "Dude," he told Jared, according to Sanchez. "We can be together all the way through this time."
Jared assured his parents that being a sniper was less dangerous than being an infantryman. "I told him, 'Jared are you sure?' " his mother recalled. "He gave me that big grin of his and said, 'Don't worry, Mom.' "
They bought him the best bipod and laser rangefinder for $500. Before he left in August, he and his older brother, Jason, a Fresno County sheriff's deputy, and younger brother, Nathan, got the same tattoo on their left biceps: three interlocking ravens.
Jared kept in touch by e-mail and phone. A month ago, he told one of his friends about a mission that was so risky he felt compelled to protest. "He wasn't the kind of kid to question authority unless he thought there was a good reason," his father said.
Jeremiah was having his own conflicted feelings. "He told me he was having a harder time telling the good Iraqis from the bad ones," his father said. "He had killed some who were quite clearly enemy insurgents, but there were others who were ambiguous. And that troubled him."
Last Wednesday night, the Hubbards tried to e-mail Jared to give him the news of the presidential election. "I said, 'Jared, Bush won. Your dad and I are so happy, but where are you? Where are you?' "
The next morning, Terry Baro had dropped off her two youngest sons at elementary school when she noticed two Marines standing outside her door.
"Is Jeremiah dead?" she asked. When the Marines drew closer, she asked a second question, "Did Jared die too?"
The bodies came home at midnight Monday. Peggy Hubbard said as much as she heard the Marine officer's account, she thought her son was still alive and it was all a bad dream. When she saw him lying there in the casket, she had to check his body for herself.
"I am his mother. I know how his lips go. I know how his chin goes. I know if he's swollen on one side or not," she said. "On the back of his head, all the way around, I found these stitches."
St. Anthony's Catholic Church was packed for the funeral — a congressman, state senators, two mayors, scores of law enforcement officers from Clovis and Fresno, hundreds of family, friends and teachers, and a dozen boys, now men, wearing their old Buchanan lettermen's jackets.
Under a sky that was part rain and part sun, seven Marine riflemen fired three times each — a 21-gun salute — over the heads of the bodies and into the direction of the Sierra. A bugler played taps, two white doves flew into a rainbow and the parents of Cpl. Jeremiah Baro and Lance Cpl. Jared Hubbard fingered the flags just handed to them.
Of all of her son's possessions that the military has given her, Peggy Hubbard said maybe the most comforting — and mystifying — is Jared's wristwatch. Here was this explosion that tore apart her son and his best friend, and the watch was still telling perfect Iraqi time, 10 hours into the future.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-veterans12nov12,1,3967918.story?coll=la-headlines-california
Scary Times, Even for a Preacher
In my lifetime, there's been one constant in American culture. We've always needed a good target — someone to blame for all our fears and unmet dreams.
African Americans, hippies, communists, Mexican immigrants, homosexuals.
I missed a couple of groups, but you get the point. And the reason I bring this up is that I met with a retired preacher the other day, and he put it all in perspective.
The Rev. John H. Townsend, pastor emeritus of the First Baptist Church of Los Angeles, had dropped me a line after the election. He was grieving over what he called the current "corruption of Christian faith."
I drove to Townsend's house near Hancock Park to hear what he was talking about. Townsend, a slight and soft-spoken man with spectacles, greeted me at the door along with his wife, Carol, a retired schoolteacher.
The retired pastor began by explaining that when he joined First Baptist near the Bullocks Wilshire department store in 1962, the adjoining neighborhood wasn't yet known as Koreatown. Both the church and the neighborhood were still going through wrenching changes.
Before Townsend's arrival, the predominantly white congregation was bitterly split over the acceptance of African Americans into the parish. Some members walked away when First Baptist decided to open the doors to one and all.
Under Townsend, the church went United Nations, passing out headphones for Spanish-language interpretation of services. Then Townsend brought in a Korean minister, followed by a Filipino minister, and the church became a beacon in a time of racial division, celebrating cultural differences in God's name.
So it should come as no surprise that Townsend wasn't too happy with the role "Christianity" played in the recent presidential election. From where he sits, Christianity was used to divide and conquer.
"This is a scary time," he said. He wonders if the spreading stain of hypocrisy will drive some people away from faith, because under the guise of morality, bigotry was used to get the vote out for President Bush.
"I felt manipulated," Pastor Townsend said in reference to the "hubbub raised by the religious right" over homosexuality in particular. "There was this attitude of triumphalism."
Townsend said he was having a conversation with colleagues before the election when someone asked what they should say about the gay issue.
"The answer was that we should say what Jesus said about it. Nothing."
One corruption of the faith, Townsend says, is the selective use of biblical passages by the religious right. Interpreting literally, he pointed out, you can use the Bible to perpetrate all manner of horrors.
"In Psalms, there's a passage about when the enemy comes, you should bash the heads of children against the stones," he said, going on to cite several more examples.
"The Bible must be read contextually, and the real test for us today is: What would Jesus say or do? If he's our touchstone, and Jesus says love your neighbor, that seems more Christian to me than judge your neighbor."
On the very day I write this column, the Rev. Jerry Falwell has launched something called the Faith and Values Coalition to capture the momentum of the Nov. 2 election.
The idea of this "21st century Moral Majority," as Falwell called it, is to "maintain an evangelical revolution of voters who will continue to go to the polls to vote Christian."
One might question the wisdom of an evangelical uprising at a time when we're trying to convince the Arab world we're not anti-Muslim oil raiders. It also seems fair to ask what exactly it means to punch a ballot like a true Christian.
Is it Christian to vote for a man who is pro-life and yet calls himself the war president; who gives tax breaks to millionaires while 40 million people have no health insurance; and who has not exactly been the most faithful steward of a fragile planet that was ostensibly the work of the creator?
There's nothing wrong with vigorously debating Christian values, Townsend says.
"Absolutes escape us."
But President Bush has left no room for that discussion.
"This business of Bush's about reporting to a higher authority, well, I don't say he shouldn't feel that way. But why does he have to tell us? That's what I mean by triumphalism. How can I answer his claim if he's getting this from direct revelation? It pulls the plug on reasonable discourse.
"Isaiah said, 'Come, let us reason together, says the Lord.' "
So how exactly does one reverse the tide of an evangelical revolution and the cheapening of Christianity?
"By lifting up other voices," Townsend says. Last Sunday, he gave the sermon at Fairview Community Church in Costa Mesa and called for "a new hearing of the gospel."
"As has often been said," he told the congregation, "the ground is level at the foot of Jesus' cross. No one is superior there; no one is inferior."
Townsend ended his sermon with the same simple idea he shared with me at the end of our conversation — an idea that has guided him since he began his L.A. ministry more than 40 years ago. "Jesus laid it out when he said, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' "
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopez10nov10,1,3304382.column
'Groundhog Day' in Iraq
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: November 11, 2004
I got a brief glimpse of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's news conference on Monday, as the battle for Falluja began. I couldn't help but rub my eyes for a moment and wonder aloud whether I had been transported back in time to some 20 months ago, when the war for Iraq had just started. Watching CNN, I saw the same Rummy joking with the Pentagon press corps, the same scratchy reports from the front by "embedded reporters,'' the same footage of U.S. generals who briefed the soldiers preparing for battle about how they were liberating Iraq.
There was only one difference that no one seemed to want to mention. It wasn't 20 months ago. It was now. And Iraq has still not been fully liberated. In fact, as the fight for Falluja shows, it hasn't even been fully occupied.
Taking in this scene I had very mixed feelings: a fervent hope that victory in Falluja will start to tip Iraq in the right direction, and utter scorn at the fact that we are now, once again, fighting a full-scale war in central Iraq, without an ounce of self-reflection by an administration that long ago declared "mission accomplished.'' But don't worry. Rummy has it all under control. He hasn't made any mistakes. Everything is going as planned. The plan was always to fight running street battles in Falluja 20 months after Saddam's fall.
So lay off. Shut up. Watch Fox. Wave a flag. Visit a red state. Don't ask how we got into this fix. Shut up. Lay off. Watch Fox. ...
Alas, I'm part of that dwindling minority who believe that a decent outcome in Iraq is both hugely important and still possible. But the "déjà vu all over again" battle for Falluja only reminds me that I still have the same questions I had before the Iraq war started. Free advice: until you have answers to the following six questions, don't believe any happy talk coming from the Bush team on Iraq.
Question 1 Have we really finished the war in Iraq? And by that I mean, is it safe for Iraqis and reconstruction workers to drive even from the Baghdad airport into town, and for Iraqi politicians to hold campaign rallies and have a national dialogue about their country's future?
Question 2 Do we have enough soldiers in Iraq to really provide a minimum level of security? Up to now President Bush has applied what I call the Rumsfeld Doctrine in Iraq: just enough troops to protect ourselves, but not Iraqis, and just enough troops to be blamed for everything that goes wrong in Iraq, but not enough to make things go right.
Ah, Friedman, what do you know about troop levels? Actually, not much. Never shot a gun. But I'm not a chef either, and I know a good meal when I eat one. I know chaos when I see it, and my guess is that we are still at least two divisions short in Iraq.
Question 3 Can Iraqis agree on constitutional power-sharing? Is there a political entity called Iraq? Or is there just a bunch of disparate tribes and ethnic and religious communities? Is Iraq the way Iraq is because Saddam was the way Saddam was, or was Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraqis are the way they are - congenitally divided? We still don't know the answer to this fundamental question because there has not been enough security for Iraqis to have a real horizontal dialogue.
Question 4 If Iraqis are able to make the leap from the despotism of Saddam Hussein to free elections and representative government, can we live with whomever they elect - which will be mostly politicians from Islamist parties? I take a very expansive view of this since it took Europe several hundred years to work out the culture, habits and institutions of constitutional politics. What you are seeing in Iraq today are the necessary first steps. If Iraqis elect Islamist politicians, so be it. But is our president ready for that group shot?
Question 5 Can we make a serious effort to achieve a psychological breakthrough with Iraqis and the wider Arab world? U.S. diplomacy in this regard has been pathetic. "It is sad to say this, but after 18 months the U.S. still hasn't convinced Iraqis that it means well,'' said Yitzhak Nakash, the Brandeis University expert on Iraq. "We have never been able to persuade Iraqis that we aren't there for the oil. There still isn't a basis for mutual trust.''
Question 6 Can the Bush team mend fences with Iran, and forge an understanding with Saudi Arabia and Syria to control the flow of Sunni militants into Iraq, so the situation there can be stabilized and the jihadists killed in Falluja are not replaced by a new bunch?
This time, let no one claim victory, or defeat, in Iraq until we have the answers to these six questions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/11/opinion/11friedman.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2d...
Hello all...been busy but guess I got in under the wire. Good to see the regulars posting and I have enjoyed much of what is offered here. I miss the big brains, our good friend rooster HAHAHAHAHAHAHA, dzr, f6, easy, teepee, and definitely zitboy, which by the way, great job this administration is doing in 'winning the peace', huh zit. Still got that creaky three-legged stool??
Death Comes Knocking
By BOB HERBERT
Published: November 12, 2004
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he e-mail to John Witmer from his daughter Michelle came on Father's Day in 2003.
"Dear Daddy," it said, "Happy Father's Day. I love you so much and you can't imagine how often I think of you. I hope you have lots of fun today and that the weather is lovely.
"We had a briefing telling us to prepare ourselves as best as possible for what lies ahead. Things like children running out in front of vehicles to try and get them to stop. We have to prepare ourselves to hit people because stopping is not an option. I guess every convoy that's gone up north so far has taken fire or been ambushed. The question of whether we will or not is not even really a question, more like a guess as to when.
"These things, as you can imagine, are a lot to take in. I'm doing my best. I've been a little depressed lately but I'm trying to keep my chin up. I really miss home. Tomorrow will be exactly three months since I got deployed. Wow, time does not fly. Jeez, this letter wasn't supposed to be down. Sorry. Back to the point. Happy Father's Day. I love and miss you so much.
"Love, Shelly."
Specialist Michelle Witmer of New Berlin, Wis., survived for nearly 10 more slowly moving months in Iraq, until she was cut down by enemy fire in Baghdad last April 9. She was 20 when she died.
The e-mail was read on camera by her dad in an extremely moving documentary, "Last Letters Home," which was jointly produced by The New York Times and HBO. It premiered on HBO last night.
In the hourlong program, grieving relatives read aloud from letters, cards and e-mail sent by troops who died in Iraq, and comment on the ways they've been affected by the loss of their loved ones. The program is not about pro-war or anti-war sentiments, or grand geopolitical visions. It just gives us a glimpse of the searing personal toll that is inevitable in war. I imagine it would be difficult for anyone to see it and not take the war more seriously. Anything that imposes such unmitigated agony should give us pause.
Second Lt. Leonard Cowherd III of Culpeper, Va., commented in his last letter to his wife, Sarah, about how young so many of the soldiers were, which was interesting because he was only 22 himself. He wrote:
"Some of these guys out here, Sarah, they're just kids. I'm not that old myself but I couldn't imagine going through the experiences these guys are going through at the age of 18, 19 and 20. If you saw them walking down the street you would think that they belonged in an arcade or at a movie theater doing stuff kids do. Not putting their lives on the line every second of every day."
The Cowherds were married last year and spent only a few months together before Lieutenant Cowherd was shipped to Iraq. He was shot to death in Karbala in May.
A theme that runs through the documentary is the overwhelming sense of dread that grips relatives when their doors are knocked upon by soldiers or marines in dress uniforms.
"It was the lightest tap on my door that I've ever heard in my life," said Paula Zasadny, the mother of Specialist Holly McGeogh, a 19-year-old who was killed by a bomb in Kirkuk.
"I opened the door and I seen the man in the dress greens and I knew. I immediately knew. But I thought that if, as long as I didn't let him in, he couldn't tell me. And then it - none of that would've happened. So he kept saying, 'Ma'am, I need to come in.' And I kept telling him, 'I'm sorry, but you can't come in.' "
As much as possible, the reality of war is kept at a distance from the American people, which is a shame. My own belief is that the pain of war should be much more widely shared. That would help guard us against wars that are unnecessary, and ensure a more collective effort in those that are inevitable.
This documentary takes us a small step toward understanding the awful depth of that pain.
Melissa Givens was told by a chaplain that her husband, Pfc. Jesse Givens, who was 34, had drowned when his tank fell into the Euphrates River. Distraught, she insisted that the chaplain was lying. But she said that was O.K., because she would never tell anyone that he had lied. She said he could walk away and she would just forget about the whole thing.
Private Givens died on May 1, 2003, the day that President Bush, on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, declared that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."
Paul Krugman will be on book leave until January.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/opinion/12herbert.html?oref=login&n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials...
Enduring this is hard work
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate
PHILADELPHIA - We all had our debate moments, but the one that stunned me was, "It's [Iraq is] hard work. I see it on the TV screens."
Watching it on TV? Boy, that is tough work all right. And what was the "hard work" thing about? Did Karl Rove poll and find out people think the president vacations too much?
I also came to a full stop after the one about sending troops to die: "I never -- when I was running -- when we had the debate in 2000, never dreamt I'd be doing that."
He never dreamt it? It never occurred to him? Was this man prepared for the job? Help!
I lean to the "bubble president" theory of Bush's peevish, petulant performance in debate. They've kept him surrounded by people who keep telling him he's great. Bush is not used to being questioned. I blame Rove, of course.
In Bob Woodward's book Bush at War, the president is quoted: "I'm the commander in chief, see, I don't need to explain, I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting part about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."
He never has liked being questioned about anything, going back to his years as governor, when he often snapped at reporters who asked tough questions during news conferences. As president, he practically never has news conferences, so he's really out of practice, and since the R's control Congress, he gets no challenge there.
Now in Philadelphia, where politics is really special, they're having another dandy scandal where their pols sold out for peanuts. At least they're up from the $300 bribe during the late, great judges' scandal to a couple of grand per City Hall official.
Meanwhile, the presidential race here is a pip. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports voter registration up dramatically, there are volunteers on every street corner in downtown Philly, the media are swamped with ads, door-knockers, rallies -- it's an election.
The New York Times didn't let this one sneak by: It Page One-ed the news that public libraries and schools around the country are no longer receiving high-speed Internet access and telephone service. The Bush administration, without public notice, put a moratorium on $1 billion in new grants that the states expected to receive by the end of the year.
This could shut down service in many states. It is particularly crucial in rural areas. The Federal Communications Commission wants tighter rules put on the grants that finance equipment and service, supposedly to prevent fraud. However, the big telecommunications companies have been fighting the "Gore Tax" ever since the law passed back in 1996.
According to the Times, the FCC has been reducing those companies' contributions to the program for the past nine months. In the name of sound management, the FCC is forcing the entity that runs the program to liquidate more than $3 billion in investments at a loss not yet calculated. Boy, that's shrewd management.
Speaking of stupid government, for a truly pathological example of how ideological fixations and denying reality can cost us dearly, to the $200 billion for the disaster in Iraq add at least $150 billion to deploy the unproven and unworkable missile defense system, a.k.a. Star Wars.
Since Star Wars was a pet scheme of Ronald Reagan's, Republicans insist on trying to carry out this nutty idea, the equivalent of hitting a bullet with a bullet. Ye olde military-defense complex also has a rather large stake in keeping this dog of a program going.
We have spent $90 billion on it since 1983, with much more to come. The thing is supposed to be deployed this year, but it will have no demonstrated capability and would be ineffective against a real attack by long-range missiles.
Between 1999 and December 2000, the thing was five for eight against targets with the information of the time and place of the launch and the missile's trajectory fed to the interceptor. In other words, totally rigged tests.
The list of what's either wrong or doubtful about this system is nearly endless. The Union of Concerned Scientists points out that we have no evidence that it will ever be able to distinguish between warheads and weather balloons. The New Yorker notes that none of our enemies has ICBMs and that we are trying "to protect a nation from terrorists with box cutters and suitcase bombs."
Sometimes I get the feeling the whole country is being run by Paris Hilton.
And I laugh at anyone who thinks Bush beat Kerry....like you did Rooster! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
I laugh at any propaganda that suggest Edwards beat Cheney! HAHAHAHAHA! It just did not happen!
I love you Lib nuts! There is no way in Hell that Kerry won that debate last night! At least y'all have not let me down! Been lurking since the Nazi regime made the board premium, and have predicted exactly what y'all would say after the debate! I was right on the money! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=4182557
Look again, big brain, that is Cheney behind the curtain pulling the levers of power for your hero...
It's funny but Kerry's reminds me of The Wizard of Oz...
"pay no attention to the man behind the curtain"
I thought Cheney didn't see Bush as he was making his turn...
Cheney Rolls Over Deer in Headlights
October 6, 2004
Listen to Rush…
LOL....good one,dzr....lol:)
F6, easy, tp...good stuff being posted here. Thanks. Bulldzr, good article you emailed F6...I forwarded it on to my good Republican friends. And ed, enjoy listening to our Prez (fellow 'big brain') this evening!!
Have a good weekend all...