“[The decision to send more troops to Iraq] is a decision by John Abizaid. General Abizaid makes the decision as to whether or not he needs more troops.”
– President George W. Bush, 10/28/03
Fact:
“The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”
– U.S. Constitution, Article 2, Section 2
From TOMPAINE.com
“Imagine if during Prohibition, Calvin Coolidge had prevailed upon the prime minister of France to burn that country’s vineyards. Today at TAP Online, Christopher Hayes says that’s more or less analogous to what we asked of Bolivia’s president in recent years by demanding that he cooperate in our coca eradication efforts. So it’s not surprising that popular outrage forced him from office this week.”
From TAPPED
President Holds Press Conference October 28
The “Mission Accomplished” sign, of course, was put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln, saying that their mission was accomplished. I know it was attributed some how to some ingenious advance man from my staff — they weren’t that ingenious, by the way.
According to a report on Democracy Now and several other sources, the “White House Alters Website To Block Google Archives”
Meanwhile it has been revealed that the White House has manipulated its web site to prevent Internet search engines including Google from archiving portions of the White House website related to Iraq. Over the past few months the White House has come under criticism for altering archived pages as the situation in Iraq worsens. In the most widely noted case the White House altered the headline for its coverage of his speech aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. The web page originally read “President Bush announces combat operations in Iraq have ended.” But several months later the text “combat operations” was changed to “major combat operations” as it became evident that the fighting in Iraq had not ended.
This is probably a violation of the Presidential Records Act among other things.
Anthony Lewis writing in in The New York Review of Books on Un-American Activities:
The Times of London last May published a letter to the editor from Tony Willoughby of Willoughby & Partners, a firm of solicitors. “The head of IT [information technology] at our law firm,” he wrote,
is a Muslim. He is a gentleman in every sense of the word. His fanaticism, if he has any, is restricted to cricket. Last Sunday he went on a business trip to California. On arrival at Los Angeles he was detained and interrogated on suspicion of being a terrorist….For the first 12 hours he was refused access to a telephone. After 16 hours, not having been given any food, he asked if he could have some. He was given ham sandwiches and, when he explained that he could not eat pork, was told: “You eat what you are given.” He did not eat. He was eventually escorted back to the airport in handcuffs and deported.
Mr. Willoughby wrote to American officials seeking an explanation. He got back what he calls “a fobbing-off letter”—and his firm’s laptop computer, which had been confiscated at the airport. Its data had been wiped out.
That is a mild example, very mild, of what has happened to the US government’s treatment of aliens since September 11, 2001.
Lewis reviews Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism by David Cole and writes, “I did not really appreciate the scope of what the Bush administration has done to non-citizens until I read this book.”
Remarks By George Bush, 41st President of the United States, At the Dedication Ceremony for the George Bush Center for Intelligence:
To combat them we need more intelligence, not less. We need more human intelligence. That means we need more protection for the methods we use to gather intelligence and more protection for our sources, particularly our human sources, people that are risking their lives for their country. (Applause)
Even though I’m a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious, of traitors.
President Bush was apparently among the 70% of Americans who believed Iraq and Saddam Hussein were behind the September 11th attacks.
Amina Lawal, the Nigerian peasant woman sentenced under Islamic law to death by stoning for having had sex outside marriage, was acquitted and set free this week. One aspect of her legal defense is worth noting. As reported in The New York Times: “The court also gave a nod to what defense attorneys had called the ‘sleeping embryo’ theory: Under some interpretations of Shariah, an embryo can be in gestation for up to five years, meaning that Ms. Lawal’s baby could have been fathered by her former husband.” [Shariah is the body of religious law governing the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam.]
Excellent analysis from Jonathan Rauch
“If people did a few things — graduated from high school, got a job, and delayed having a baby until they married — our analysis shows that would eliminate a huge chunk of poverty in this country,” says Sawhill, “and that would be far more effective than anything we could feasibly do through the welfare system alone.”
Both the Senate (95-0) and the House of Representatives (412-8) voted Thursday to grant the Federal Trade Commission authority to create a national “do-not-call” list for telemarketers. That means the list should go into effect next Wednesday as had been expected before a court ruled otherwise. Exempt are charities, surveys and politicians.
From The Atlantic:
Why tax the well-off? Because, two recent studies suggest, it’s practically the only way to persuade them to spend money on anyone but themselves. Philanthropy isn’t the answer: a survey from The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that Americans making $70,000 or more dispensed a paltry 3.3 percent of their earnings to charitable causes; in contrast, those making $50,000 to $69,999 gave 5.6 percent, and those making $30,000 to $49,999 gave 8.9 percent. Only at death does the tightfistedness diminish—but even then it’s the threat of the estate tax that awakens the philanthropic spirit. Or at least that’s the conclusion of another new study, which predicts that deathbed donations will drop precipitously if the Bush Administration succeeds rolling back the estate tax. The study finds that the cost of such a repeal, in lost donations and bequests, could be as steep as $10 billion a year—the equivalent of the grants doled out annually by the nation’s 110 largest foundations.
Hard-hitting column today from Tom Friedman:
And one thing we know about this Bush war on terrorism: sacrifice is only for Army reservists and full-time soldiers. For the rest of us, it’s guns and butter. When it comes to the police and military sides of the war on terrorism, the Bushies behave like Viking warriors. But when it comes to the political and economic sacrifices and strategies that are also required to fight this war successfully, they are cowardly wimps. That is why our war on terrorism is so one-dimensional and Pentagon-centric. It’s more like a hobby — something we do only until it runs into the Bush re-election agenda.
“Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn’t go when you had the chance.” Max Cleland on the parallels.
NewMexiKen was home from Virginia only 30 minutes or less before the first telemarketing call. These calls all go away October 1st, right?
Notes on Gen. Wesley Clark’s appearance in Iowa from Tung Yin, Associate Professor, College of Law, The University of Iowa.
What should be our direction?
1) Inclusiveness: “You don’t make us safer by erecting walls to keep others out, but by building bridges. . . .”2) International organizations: “We have to use international institutions, not condemn and abuse them.” We need the U.N., and the U.N. needs us, he said.
3) Use of force: We should believe in a strong and effective military, but we should also realize that force is to be used as a last resort. “It’s very difficult to change people’s minds when you are bombing and killing them.”
From the American Experience
Stars & Stripes has the following report:
Troops wounded in combat in the nation’s war on terrorism are being handed more than just discharge papers when they leave military hospitals — some also are getting a bill.
At a daily rate of $8.10, hospitalized troops, including those wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, are being charged for their meals.
There was once a shepherd-boy who kept his flock at a little distance from the village. Once he thought he would play a trick on the villagers and have some fun at their expense. So he ran toward the village crying out, with all his might, —
“Wolf! Wolf! Come and help! The wolves are at my lambs!”
The kind villagers left their work and ran to the field to help him. But when they got there the boy laughed at them for their pains; there was no wolf there.
Still another day the boy tried the same trick, and the villagers came running to help and got laughed at again. Then one day a wolf did break into the fold and began killing the lambs. In great fright, the boy ran for help. “Wolf! Wolf!” he screamed. “There is a wolf in the flock! Help!”
The villagers heard him, but they thought it was another mean trick; no one paid the least attention, or went near him. And the shepherd-boy lost all his sheep.
That is the kind of thing that happens to people who lie: even when they tell the truth no one believes them.
The American Prospect’s Tapped on UNIONS, CONT.:
…but Tapped is afraid that there remain plenty of problems in the American economy and within Americans’ workplaces that unions, even where they do exist, simply don’t have the power to confront. All we mean to say is that it would be a nice change of pace if Democratic politicians could address the millions of nonunion employees who don’t see themselves as “workers” and instead see themselves as people with crappy jobs and not a lot of help.
Things just look different to people who’ve never been in unions, never worked in unionized sectors and are unlikely to ever get a chance to join a union unless they start one themselves. It’s important to realize how distant a lot of folks feel from unions — whether that’s out of ignorance of what unions do or out of the reality of their lived experiences in the work world…
Dizzying Dive to Red Ink Poses Stark Choices for Washington: “When President Bush informed the nation last Sunday night that remaining in Iraq next year will cost another $87 billion, many of those who will actually pay that bill were unable to watch. They had already been put to bed by their parents.” [emphasis added]
Paul Krugman presents a cogent discussion of tax-cuts and government spending in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. We are not over-taxed as a nation, the wealthy received the preponderance of the Bush tax-cuts, and a huge fiscal crisis is looming.
[T]he coming crisis will allow conservatives to move the nation a long way back toward the kind of limited government we had before Franklin Roosevelt. Lack of revenue, he says, will make it possible for conservative politicians — in the name of fiscal necessity — to dismantle immensely popular government programs that would otherwise have been untouchable.
In [tax critic Grover] Norquist’s vision, America a couple of decades from now will be a place in which elderly people make up a disproportionate share of the poor, as they did before Social Security. It will also be a country in which even middle-class elderly Americans are, in many cases, unable to afford expensive medical procedures or prescription drugs and in which poor Americans generally go without even basic health care. And it may well be a place in which only those who can afford expensive private schools can give their children a decent education.
But as Governor Riley of Alabama reminds us, that’s a choice, not a necessity. The tax-cut crusade has created a situation in which something must give. But what gives — whether we decide that the New Deal and the Great Society must go or that taxes aren’t such a bad thing after all — is up to us. The American people must decide what kind of a country we want to be.
Slate has published A Guide to the Patriot Act. It’s a four-part series that details sections of the Act, what they permit, how the law changed, how the section has been implemented and the likely outcome. Each analysis ends with a quick summary called “Enough to get you through a cocktail party.”
It’s the Sunday before Sept. 11, so it’s no surprise to start seeing coverage of the two-year anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In perhaps the most hard-hitting anniversary coverage, the Post runs two superb A1 stories, one on al-Qaida regrouping in Iraq, and the other examining holes in the Department of Homeland Security.
According to the WP, al-Qaida began planning their new front in Iraq in February. Since then, anywhere from 1,000 to several thousand foreign fighters have entered the country through Iraq’s borders with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. While its tricky-to-track borders (mountainous, unmarked) provide AQ members and sympathetic radicals the ease to travel into the country, the American occupation gives them a reinvigorated reason to make the trip. Based on interviews with European, American, and Arab intelligence sources, this story is a must-read.
The Department of Homeland Security, spawned by the attacks of two years ago, is now “hobbled by money woes, disorganization, turf battles and unsteady support from the White House,” the WP says. Some of the problems belying the 6-month-old agency: The top two officials under Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge are resigning; the department’s headquarters are cramped and ill-equipped; its budget is too small; it has trouble luring talented staffers; support from the White House is lukewarm. “Not a lot is getting done at the top of the department,” an anonymous White House official tells the paper. “Nobody’s got the fortitude to say, ‘Sit down and shut up.’ … It’s sad.”
From Slate’s Today’s Papers