Forget the Surge

Obama Realism in Iraq
HuffPost
In response, Scowcroft [McCain advisor] said: "I wouldn't use that as a benchmark. ... Iran would be crazy if it weren't trying to influence the situation in Iraq. That's one of the things eventually we need to talk about. ... I don't think we can stay long enough so that there's no Iranian influence. Because of their religion, for one thing. The Shia holy sites are in Iraq. Many of the Iraqi clergy spent decades in Iran during the Saddam period. So it's more complicated than that."
Given a previous instance of rhetorical overlap between Scowcroft and Obama, it's worth noting that the Illinois Democrat advanced a similarly "realist" analysis regarding Iran's influence in Iraq earlier this year, when he said: "We are not going to kill every Al Qaeda sympathizer, eliminate every trace of Iranian influence, or stand up a flawless democracy before we leave."

Albert Anastasia and George Bush

America prefers a rich murderer to a rich adulterer. The Congress should have impeached GWB three years ago. The president got away with torture and murder after Clinton went down on oral sex in the oval office. This affair cost Al Gore votes and possibly the election.

The Republican hate machine will try to link Barack Obama to his fellow Democrat John Edwards. As heterosexuals, they incur the special wrath of unforgiving doodads.

In future Democratic literature should link political figures with their crimes i.e. cluster bomber Rice, mad bomber McCain and Torture Cheney.

Bush,

Citizen Arrest for Condi

New Zealand: Citizen Arrest for
Condi

Posted by Amira Al Hussaini ·
Voices without Votes · Afghanistan · Iraq · New Zealand

In addition to talks with the New Zealand Government, US Secretary of

State Condoleezza Rice was in for a surprise when the Auckland University
Students' Association (AUSA) announced a $5,000 reward for any student who
makes a citizen's arrest on the visiting official. The reward has since been
withdrawn and according to Press reports, AUSA had said the arrest would be for
Dr Rice's role in “overseeing the illegal invasion and continued occupation” of
Iraq, and crimes under the Geneva Conventions Act 1958, and the Crimes of
Torture Act 1989."

How Obama Became Acting President

How Obama Became Acting President
Frank Rich, NYTimes

IT almost seems like a gag worthy of “Borat”: A smooth-talking rookie senator with an exotic name passes himself off as the incumbent American president to credulous foreigners. But to dismiss Barack Obama’s magical mystery tour through old Europe and two war zones as a media-made fairy tale would be to underestimate the ingenious politics of the moment. History was on the march well before Mr. Obama boarded his plane, and his trip was perfectly timed to reap the whirlwind.
He never would have been treated as a president-in-waiting by heads of state or network talking heads if all he offered were charisma, slick rhetoric and stunning visuals. What drew them instead was the raw power Mr. Obama has amassed: the power to start shaping events and the power to move markets, including TV ratings. (Even “Access Hollywood” mustered a 20 percent audience jump by hosting the Obama family.) Power begets more power, absolutely.
The growing Obama clout derives not from national polls, where his lead is modest. Nor is it a gift from the press, which still gives free passes to its old bus mate John McCain. It was laughable to watch journalists stamp their feet last week to try to push Mr. Obama into saying he was “wrong” about the surge. More than five years and 4,100 American fatalities later, they’re still not demanding that Mr. McCain admit he was wrong when he assured us that our adventure in Iraq would be fast, produce little American “bloodletting” and “be paid for by the Iraqis.”
Never mind. This election remains about the present and the future, where Iraq’s $10 billion a month drain on American pocketbooks and military readiness is just one moving part in a matrix of national crises stretching from the gas pump to Pakistan. That’s the high-rolling political casino where Mr. Obama amassed the chips he cashed in last week. The “change” that he can at times wield like a glib marketing gimmick is increasingly becoming a substantive reality — sometimes through Mr. Obama’s instigation, sometimes by luck. Obama-branded change is snowballing, whether it’s change you happen to believe in or not.
Looking back now, we can see that the fortnight preceding the candidate’s flight to Kuwait was like a sequence in an old movie where wind blows away calendar pages to announce an epochal plot turn. First, on July 7, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, dissed Bush dogma by raising the prospect of a withdrawal timetable for our troops. Then, on July 15, Mr. McCain suddenly noticed that more Americans are dying in Afghanistan than Iraq and called for more American forces to be sent there. It was a long-overdue recognition of the obvious that he could no longer avoid: both Robert Gates, the defense secretary, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had already called for more American troops to battle the resurgent Taliban, echoing the policy proposed by Mr. Obama a year ago.
On July 17 we learned that President Bush, who had labeled direct talks with Iran “appeasement,” would send the No. 3 official in the State Department to multilateral nuclear talks with Iran. Lest anyone doubt that the White House had moved away from the rigid stand endorsed by Mr. McCain and toward Mr. Obama’s, a former Rumsfeld apparatchik weighed in on The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page: “Now Bush Is Appeasing Iran.”
Within 24 hours, the White House did another U-turn, endorsing an Iraq withdrawal timetable as long as it was labeled a “general time horizon.” In a flash, as Mr. Obama touched down in Kuwait, Mr. Maliki approvingly cited the Democratic candidate by name while laying out a troop-withdrawal calendar of his own that, like Mr. Obama’s, would wind down in 2010. On Tuesday, the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced a major drawdown of his nation’s troops by early 2009.
But it’s not merely the foreign policy consensus that is shifting Obama-ward. The Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens has now joined another high-profile McCain supporter, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in knocking the McCain nostrum that America can drill its way out of its energy crisis. Mr. Pickens, who financed the Swift-boat campaign smearing John Kerry in 2004, was thought to be a sugar daddy for similar assaults against the Democrats this year. Instead, he is underwriting nonpartisan ads promoting wind power and speaks of how he would welcome Al Gore as energy czar if there’s an Obama administration.
The Obama stampede is forcing Mr. McCain to surrender on other domestic fronts. After the Democrat ran ads in 14 states berating chief executives who are “making more in 10 minutes” than many workers do in a year, a newly populist Mr. McCain began railing against “corporate greed” — much as he also followed Mr. Obama’s example and belatedly endorsed a homeowners’ bailout he had at first opposed. Given that Mr. McCain has already used a refitted, hand-me-down Obama campaign slogan (“A Leader You Can Believe In”), it can’t be long before he takes up fist bumps. They’ve become the rage among young (nonterrorist) American businessmen, according to USA Today.
“We have one president at a time,” Mr. Obama is careful to say. True, but the sitting president, a lame duck despised by voters and shunned by his own party’s candidates, now has all the gravitas of Mr. Cellophane in “Chicago.” The opening for a successor arrived prematurely, and the vacuum had been waiting to be filled. What was most striking about the Obama speech in Berlin was not anything he said so much as the alternative reality it fostered: many American children have never before seen huge crowds turn out abroad to wave American flags instead of burn them.
Mr. McCain could also have stepped into the leadership gap left by Mr. Bush’s de facto abdication. His inability to even make a stab at doing so is troubling. While drama-queen commentators on television last week were busy building up false suspense about the Obama trip — will he make a world-class gaffe? will he have too large an audience in Germany? — few focused on the alarms that Mr. McCain’s behavior at home raise about his fitness to be president.
Once again the candidate was making factual errors about the only subject he cares about, imagining an Iraq-Pakistan border and garbling the chronology of the Anbar Awakening. Once again he displayed a tantrum-prone temperament ill-suited to a high-pressure 21st-century presidency. His grim-faced crusade to brand his opponent as a traitor who wants to “lose a war” isn’t even a competent impersonation of Joe McCarthy. Mr. McCain comes off instead like the ineffectual Mr. Wilson, the retired neighbor perpetually busting a gasket at the antics of pesky little Dennis the Menace.
The week’s most revealing incident occurred on Wednesday when the new, supposedly improved McCain campaign management finalized its grand plan to counter Mr. Obama’s Berlin speech with a “Mission Accomplished”-like helicopter landing on an oil rig off Louisiana’s coast. The announcement was posted on politico.com even as any American with a television could see that Hurricane Dolly was imminent. Needless to say, this bit of theater was almost immediately “postponed” but not before raising the question of whether a McCain administration would be just as hapless in anticipating the next Katrina as the Bush-Brownie storm watch.
When not plotting such stunts, the McCain campaign whines about its lack of press attention like a lover jilted for a younger guy. The McCain camp should be careful what it wishes for. As its relentless goading of Mr. Obama to visit Iraq only ratcheted up anticipation for the Democrat’s triumphant trip, so its insistent demand for joint town-hall meetings with Mr. Obama and for more televised chronicling of Mr. McCain’s wanderings could be self-inflicted disasters in the making.
Mr. McCain may be most comfortable at town-hall meetings before largely friendly crowds, but his performance under pressure at this year’s G.O.P. primary debates was erratic. His sound-bite-deep knowledge of the country’s No. 1 issue, the economy, is a Gerald Ford train wreck waiting to happen in any matchup with Mr. Obama that requires focused, time-limited answers rather than rambling.
During Mr. McCain’s last two tours of the Middle East — conducted without the invasive scrutiny of network anchors — the only news he generated was his confusion of Sunni with Shia and his embarrassing stroll through a “safe” Baghdad market with helicopter cover. He should thank his stars that few TV viewers saw that he was even less at home when walking through a chaotic Pennsylvania supermarket last week. He inveighed against the price of milk while reading from a note card and felt the pain of a shopper planted by the local Republican Party.
The election remains Mr. Obama’s to lose, and he could lose it, whether through unexpected events, his own vanity or a vice-presidential misfire. But what we’ve learned this month is that America, our allies and most likely the next Congress are moving toward Mr. Obama’s post-Iraq vision of the future, whether he reaches the White House or not. That’s some small comfort as we contemplate the strange alternative offered by the Republicans: a candidate so oblivious to our nation’s big challenges ahead that he is doubling down in his campaign against both Mr. Maliki and Mr. Obama to be elected commander in chief of the surge.

Oppression of Children

Oppression of Children

"The U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to debate two bills that could give the federal government unprecedented control over the way parents raise their children – even providing funds for state workers to come into homes and screen babies for emotional and developmental problems.

"The Pre-K Act (HR 3289) and the Education Begins at Home Act (HR 2343) are two bills geared toward military and families who fall below state poverty lines. The measures are said to be a way to prevent child abuse, close the achievement gap in education between poor and minority infants versus middle-class children and evaluate babies younger than 5 for medical conditions."

Countdown to Crawford Amuses Me

Bush needs to be held accountable for his crimes. I'm Registered Republican,
It doesn't matter wether you're Democrat or Republican, It's all a lie anyways.
They all sing the same tune. We're all American no matter what our choice of
party. As American's it's our duty to hold our officials accountable for their
actions. George Bush has brought us into a war that we didn't want based on
lies and acts of false flag terror. He and his friends made a fortune off the
lives of our sons and daughters. He prayed on our fears to gain control over
our lives via the Patriot Act. He announced himself above the law. Will you all
allow him to be above the law? It's not too late. It's never too late. Yes his
term is almost over, but it's not over yet. Impeach him now before he decides
to send us into Iran
on his way out. If that happens this economy will crash and bring the whole
world down with it. If nothing is done, every president after him will know
that he/she can also be a dictator "above the law" and that the
American public wll lay down, take it, and do nothing about it.

You say it's too late? Our forefathers gave their lives to see to it that
tyrants like this were not in power. All you have to do is pick up a phone and
call Congress.

Posted by: Shad0cat

The Thousand Thousand Bush Murders

WE THE PEOPLE demand the Impeachment of G.W.Bush and Slick Dick Cheney!
They have committed crimes against us, WE THE PEOPLE, and crimes against the
People of Iraq, and are about to do the same to Iran.

Did you not find it strange NO ONE at that hearing could call Bush what he
is..A cold blooded killer, nor could they say he is a bold faced liar?

Where was their freedom of speech? What happened to their rights given to
them under the Constitution?

If our rights are taken away kiss FREEDOM OF THE PRESS goodbye as it walks
out the door.

Posted by: Misfit4Peace

Impeachment or Anger Management?

The ONLY reason Pelosi let this go to judiciary is because Cindy Sheehan
announced running against her. The problem with this country is we have a
choice between who they tell us to vote for. The Republican and Democratic
parties are just funnels for special interest money that answer to the
contributor and not to the electorate.Look at who voted to allow wiretapping
BEFORE a court order was issued -CLEARLY against the Bill of Rights they've
sworn to uphold-and whatever ELSE VOTE THESE PEOPLE OUT. We need to force
legislators to pass a law that ANY public official that purposely subverts the
constitution can be IMMEDIATELY prosecuted. Not like Rove who will laugh and
laugh until even if he IS convicted Bush will pardon. We have a MORAL
imperative to do everything within our power to prosecute people like
Bush/Cheney who seek to undermine our national ideals.Get rid of the Democratic
and Republican parties, the Federal Reserve, prosecute Bush/Cheney for treason,
rescind ALL presidential directives and "secret" laws passed by Bush,
prosecute Nancy Pelosi for complicity in treason.

Posted by: Keg

Campaign Content

Campaign Content
Television is the opiate for children and newspapers wrap fish bones superbly. The concept of content only emerges during FCC license renewal hearings.
Republicans know that quantity trumps quality.
Nobody cares about content. The candidate can say anything so long as he appears Presidential AND down-to-earth, as he is saying it.
If the voters wanted a civics lesson, they would have paid attention in the tenth grade.