The President Wants a War with Bigger Tits

By Steve Young
Created Jan 17 2007 - 9:44am

While Fox New and the far-right Lords of Loud took aim at the important news
at the Senate Hearings - namely Barbara Boxer telling Condaleezza Rice that
either of them might not suffer through the war that someone with a kid over
there would - they completely ignored what Rice suggested that President
Bush really had in mind.

Sending additional troops into Iraq is not intended as a escalation. Rather
she would call it "an augmentation."

Augmentation. Now that made a hell of a lot more sense than sending more
soldiers into a growing quagmire. And it's also something most guys would
buy and women will understand. Not like, but have experiential familiarity
with.

New Lies Forward

By Stephen Pizzo
Created Jan 17 2007 - 9:42am

Well it's a new year, and you know what that means; time to update the
administration's list of stated reasons for it's war in Iraq -- why we are
there, why we are/must "win," and why the loss of American lives there is a
"price worth paying."

Whew! Just typing the above sentence exhausted me. I'm so tired from
three-plus years of struggling with this administration's full frontal
assault on our collective intelligence. Tired of trying to untangle their
torqued logic, fractured facts and their Orwellian-ization of our language,
our traditions, our laws, our Constitution.

But I must - we all must. Because that beast, now boxed into a canyon of
it's own making, is more dangerous today than ever before. Though evermore
transparent, their lies have become even bolder. And, even with years of
disproved and discarded lies in their wake, far too many Americans - and
even the media, seem prepared to once again give them the benefit of the
doubt - when doubt itself should by now be the order of the day.

Barack, We Hardly Know Ye: A Question For Sen. Obama

By RJ Eskow
Created Jan 17 2007 - 9:31am

It's Candidacy as Celebrity, as reported by our "American Idol" political
press. The resemblance to another Presidential candidate is striking: The
good looks, the swooning crowds, the swooning reporters, and the eloquence
all bring to mind another charismatic Democrat. Unfortunately it's not John
or Bobby Kennedy.

It's Jerry Brown.

When Brown ran in for President he drew the same screaming fans and the same
enthusiastic coverage. He was a late entrant in 1976 but was given more of a
real chance in 1980. Still, but at some point his campaign failed to
coalesce on the ground. Voters weren't able to get a grasp of who this
enigmatic candidate was, or what he stood for.

Is Jerry Brown's experience a cautionary tale for Barack Obama? It's too
early to tell, and of course there are significant differences between these
two intelligent and compelling politicians. But, like Obama, Brown had a
knack for defying left-right differences. He replaced ideology with enigma
and liberalism with language. In the end, it didn't work.

Spocko, Glenn Beck, and ABC

By Eric Boehlert
Created Jan 17 2007 - 9:25am

President George W. Bush's popularity has fallen to new lows, Democrats have
been swept into office, and a strong majority of Americans now opposes the
war in Iraq, but ABC has decided the time is right to beef up with more
conservative pundits on staff and to strike out against a liberal online
critic who raised questions about the network's policy of broadcasting hate
radio.

Last week spotlighted ABC and its unfortunate trend toward irresponsibility,
as the broadcasting giant hired Glenn Beck -- a high-profile war cheerleader
[0] known for grade-school level name-calling of Democrats -- to comment on
the day's events for Good Morning America. ABC last week was also dealing
with the messy fallout from its wrongheaded decision to fire off a
cease-and-desist letter to a little-known blogger named Spocko who had been
posting audio clips from KSFO in San Francisco, an ABC-owned talk station
where hosts have advocated violence against, progressives, Muslims, and
Democratic members of Congress.

Death Watch in the Persian Gulf and Washington

By Dave Lindorff
Created Jan 17 2007 - 9:19am

Watching the slow-motion march to war against Iran is a bit like watching a
terminal cancer patient in a hospice. We know how it's going to end. We know
it's going to be tragic and ugly. But we are powerless to stop it.

There is a difference of course.

For the cancer patient, there really is no alternative.

For us, there is an alternative to the catastrophe which President Bush and
his regent, Dick Cheney, are preparing for us all.

We could rise up as a nation and demand that our elected representatives
pass a Boland-type amendment banning any use of the military in Iraq. We
could demand that a resolution be passed revoking the 2002 Authorization for
Use of Military Force against Iraq. We could demand the revocation of the
2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force which the president has
improperly cited as giving him extra-Constitutional powers. And we could
demand that Congress tell the president and vice president that if they
attack Iran without explicit congressional authorization they will both be
immediately impeached.

Chuck Hagel for President!

By Robert Scheer
Created Jan 17 2007 - 9:06am

- from Truthdig (posted with permission) [1]

Chuck Hagel for president! If it ever narrows down to a choice between him
and some Democratic hack who hasn't the guts to fundamentally challenge the
president on Iraq, then the conservative Republican from Nebraska will have
my vote. Yes, the war is that important, and the fact that Sen. Hillary
Clinton of New York, the leading Democratic candidate, still can't or won't
take a clear stand on the occupation is insulting to the vast majority of
voters who have.

Sen. Hagel is a decorated Vietnam War vet who learned the crucial lessons of
that Democrat-launched debacle of post-colonial imperialism. Even more
important, he has the courage to challenge a president from his own party
who so clearly didn't.

"The speech given last night [Jan. 10] by this president represents the most
dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam," Hagel said.
"We are projecting ourselves further and deeper into a situation that we
cannot win militarily.

The Handwriting on the Wall Says "Iran"

By Gary Leupp
Created Jan 17 2007 - 9:00am

In the Bible story, the Babylonian king Belshazzar is feasting with his
courtiers at a banquet, using the sacred golden goblets plundered from
Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem as wine cups. Suddenly, out of nowhere a hand
appears; it writes a cryptic message on the chamber wall. The king's
counselors are unable to decipher it, so Daniel is called in to interpret
its meaning. (Daniel is a Jew of the exile and a very wise man. Many years
ago he had interpreted the dreams of the king's father Nebuchadnezzar.)

The handwriting on the wall, Daniel tells King Belshazzar, consists of the
Aramaic words mene mene tekel upharsin (literally "numbered, numbered,
weighed, divided"), a message which decoded means: "God has numbered the
days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; you have been weighed on the
scales and found wanting; your kingdom is divided . . . " The last word
upharsin sounds like "Persia" in Aramaic, so Daniel adds that the divided
kingdom of Babylonia will be "given to the Medes and Persians" (New Oxford
Annotated Bible translation). It's among the most famous Bible puns.

TomGram: Michael T. Klare - Is Big Brother in Your Energy Future?

By Tom Engelhardt
Created Jan 17 2007 - 8:57am

For the last two weeks, Tomdispatch has been concentrating on the way
Pentagon strategists have taken possession of our future and are writing
their own dystopian science fiction scenarios [1] about the...

Have You Got What It Takes to Torture?

By Peter Lee
Created Jan 17 2007 - 8:48am

Now that the Iraq adventure is officially a fiasco, the liberal hawks are
crawling out of the woodwork and defend their early support for what is now
irrevocably and safely Bush's cock-up.

Max Sawicky and Kevin Drum are pushing the argument disapprovingly known as
the incompetence dodge: that the Iraq war was a failure of execution and
integrity by the Bush administration, not necessarily a repudiation of the
whole "good war" theory of scientific pre-emption and humanitarian
intervention.

That's deluded and disturbing.

I'm one of those reflexively anti-war types going back to 2002, as
documented by my archive (http://halcyondays.info [1]).

I'm not a peacenik, because I'm too cynical about human weakness to believe
that peace is going to solve the world's problems.

But I am anti-war.

I'm anti-war, not just because I don't like to see civilians, babies, and
cute puppies in a distant land blown to bits.

250,000,000, Insured but Still in Trouble: The Healthcare Crisis for the
Rest of Us

By Ted Rall
Created Jan 17 2007 - 8:38am

NEW YORK--Some people are just cheap. Others are playing the odds, reasoning
that paying for doctors and prescription medications on an ad hoc basis will
prove cheaper than the $500-plus per month they'd have to shell out for
health insurance. But most of America's 47 million uninsured live and die
without coverage because they can't afford it. Worse than a national
scandal, our failing healthcare system is an international disgrace.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are so desperate that they travel
overseas in order to leech off socialized medical care systems, which are
prevalent in other industrialized nations.

"We are overwhelmed by you (expletive deleted) Americans," an exasperated
emergency-room physician at a Canadian hospital across the border from
upstate New York told one of my friends, whose girlfriend had driven him the
eight hours from Manhattan to Quebec after he'd fallen down some stairs and
broken his arm.

We are Canada's Mexicans.