Month: February 2006

<![CDATA[Watch it. It is correct. Watch and act: Call your Congressional delegation.

Technorati Tags: accountability, Bush, civil liberties, eavesdropping

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<![CDATA[Ability to Wage ‘Long War’ Is Key To Pentagon Plan:

The Pentagon, readying for what it calls a “long war,” yesterday laid out a new 20-year defense strategy that envisions U.S. troops deployed, often clandestinely, in dozens of countries at once to fight terrorism and other nontraditional threats.

Let’s do the math: If we’re really looking at a 20-year war, based on the cost of the first three years of the war, the United States is looking at 15,000 dead, 81,000 casualties with life-altering injuries, and $2.7 trillion in war costs. Add to that the potential “enemy” “collateral deaths” and you’ve got a world pissed off to the nth degree at the global hegemonic power that the Bushies would have us become.
A decade from now the eroded civil liberties we live with today would be the raw material for persecution, not prosecution, of millions of innocent Americans who disagree with the direction the country has taken.
Not a recipe for success.

Technorati Tags: Bush, democracy, war

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<![CDATA[Our addiction to oil was the centerpiece of the State of the Union address. But, it turns out the say-one-thing-do-another politics of the Bush Administration have accelerated even more. Just hours after the President talked about weaning the U.S. economy from oil, his lackeys started backing away from the position.
Here's Dan Froomkin in the Washington Post, What the President Meant to Say:

Kevin G. Hall writes for Knight Ridder Newspapers: “One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America’s dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn’t mean it literally.

“What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025. . .

“Asked why the president used the words ‘the Middle East’ when he didn’t really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that ‘every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands.’ The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he feared that his remarks might get him in trouble.”

So, just forget that State of the Union speech. It was a lie wrapped in a call for war and fearfulness, veiling the Administration’s real intent, to keep the U.S. oil-dependent for as long as there is money to be squeezed out of that disappearing commodity.
We really should be ready for the $262 barrel of oil, but don’t look to President Bush for leadership on that.

Technorati Tags: accountability, Bush, oil, SOTU

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<![CDATA[Cindy Sheehan wasn't the only one ejected from the State of the Union for wearing a t-shirt with a slogan on it. According to Daily Kos, the wife of Republican Rep. C.W. Bill Young was tossed for wearing a t-shirt reading “Support the Troops Defending Our Freedom.”
Pro-Bush folk will point out that anyone with a t-shirt was ejected. The rest of us, who still remember what free expression really means, will recognize neither woman was doing anything illegal. I agree with Glenn Greenwald, who writes:

“…we apparently now have a country where the only ideas allowed to be expressed in our Nation’s Capitol while the President is speaking are ones which glorify the Government and its Leader and where dissenting views are prohibited and will subject someone to arrest. Message cleansing of that sort belongs at a political rally in North Korea, not in Washington, DC.”

Technorati Tags: Bush, censorship, civil liberties

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