Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Bush, Iraq, Afghanistan, Reinforcements Not Cut Backs, News Casulities, Still Gitmo, FoxNews and Unrefromed Congress.



The President, in his Memorial Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery, stated that the best way to honor the fallen in his egocentric war is by the deaths of even more U.S. service personnel.

His speech shows that he has no idea of how to come to grips with the situation and that he's just being pulled along by events and hoping for something good to happen.

ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) -- President Bush, delivering a Memorial Day message
surrounded by the graves of thousands of military dead, said Monday that the
United States must continue fighting the war on terror in the name of those have
already given their life in the cause.


"The best way to pay respect is to
value why a sacrifice was made," Bush said, quoting from a letter that Lt. Mark
Dooley wrote to his parents before being killed last September in the Iraqi city
of Ramadi.

The reality in Iraq is much different than that in Mr. Bush's fantasyland. The population is living in fear, not just of Americans, but of their own security forces and independent militias. Our invasion has turned Iraq into a nonfunctional country with the population living in constant fear.

Every morning the streets of Baghdad are littered with dozens of bodies,
bruised, torn, mutilated, executed only because they are Sunni or because they
are Shiite. Power drills are an especially popular torture device.

Under the reign of Saddam Hussein, dissidents called Iraq "the republic of
fear" and hoped it would end when Hussein was toppled. But the war, it turns
out, has spread the fear democratically. Now the terror is not merely from the
regime, or from U.S. troops, but from everybody, everywhere.

In a classic example of "too little, too late", the military announced that it will be sending the 3,500 member 2d brigade, 1st Armored Division to act as "emergenecy reinforcements" in the troubled Anbar province. The Marines here have been asking for reinforcements for over a year. Typical of the Bush Administration's management style, the needs of our military have a low priority.

BAGHDAD, May 29 -- The U.S. military said Monday it was deploying the main
reserve fighting force for Iraq, a full 3,500-member armored brigade, as
emergency reinforcements for the embattled western province of Anbar, where a
surge of violence linked to the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq has severely
damaged efforts to turn Sunni Arab tribal leaders against the insurgency.

In Ramadi, "Zarqawi is the one who is in control," the sheik said, speaking
to a Washington Post special correspondent in Ramadi. "He kills anyone who goes
in and out of the U.S. base. We have stopped meetings with the Americans,
because, frankly speaking, we have lost confidence in the U.S. side, as they
can't protect us."

The war that has claimed more correspondents than any other, has claimed two more. Paul Douglas, 48, and a soundman, James Brolan, 42, were killed, and a correspondent, Kimberly Dozier, 39, was seriously wounded in a car bomb explosion in central Baghdad.

These newspeople are a brave bunch and they do an important job for the American people. We owe them our thanks.

The President, on the other hand, says it's their fault that we feel so negative about the war, because they won't report the "good news" from Iraq. Poor deluded President, there is no good news in Iraq.

BAGHDAD, May 29 -- A car bomb explosion in central Baghdad Monday killed two CBS
News crew members, an Iraqi interpreter and a U.S. soldier, and severely wounded
the news team's correspondent, in one of a string of attacks that killed dozens
of people in Iraq over the course of the
day.
Paul Douglas, a cameraman, and James Brolan, a sound man, died in the blast,
CBS News said in a statement. Both men were British citizens based in London.
Kimberly Dozier, an American correspondent who has covered the war in Iraq for
nearly three years, was taken to a Baghdad hospital for surgery. The network
said she was listed in critical condition and that doctors were "cautiously
optimistic" about her prognosis

.

The good news from Afghanistan is that it's not quite as bad as Iraq, yet.

Like the Russians before us and the British before them, we are in control of Kabul and little else. Yesterday we weren't in control. Riots raged across Kabul after a fatal traffic accident between a U.S. military vehicle and Afghan civilian vehicles.

The Afghans are saying it's time for America to go.

More sparked this violent riot, however, than just the growing negative
perception of US troops. Many Afghas complain that Kabul is a "toilet." The city
has foul open severs, poverty remains gross and shocking, unemployment is
sky-high with at least half of working-age adults unable to find a real job, and
supposedly 40 percent of the people don't even have enough food. After four and
a half years, many feel their lives are not improving, and they are losing hope
that they will improve. That can become a dangerous spark.
What has happened in Afghanistan is something that happens often. We promise and
then we don't deliver. The dashed hopes of locals turn to resentment, hostility,
and finally violence. But it is not only the US that promised so much to
Afghans, also Europeans and other countries. And no one seems to be delivering,
at least that is how the poor and unemployed of Afghanistan see it.
With Kabul in lockdown and sporadic gunfire still echoing through the city, the
perception that the US military is the problem and not the solution will
certainly grow. But, if the reconstruction of Afghanistan does not deliver
tangible results to many more of its desperate citizens, there will surely be
more gunfire echoing through Kabul.

The Pentagon has recently started a PR campaign to improve the image of Gitmo, they don't have anything else to do, because Rumsfeld is running all the wars. It started off badly when prisoners started fighting with guards.

Gitmo made the news again when we found out we were number one in avoiding human rights accountability. Now we have at least 75 detainees going on a hunger strike. Military officials aren't sure of the reasons behind the hunger strike.

Good luck on that PR thing.

MIAMI, May 29 -- Seventy-five prisoners at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba, were on a hunger strike Monday, joining a few who have refused food
and been force-fed since August, a military official said.

FoxNews, the opiate of the ignorant.

Global warming is a plot by the Greens to take us back to the stone ages. Idiots.

There’s no scientific proof that global warming even exists. To be honest, it’s
a bogus consensus dreamed up by Greens because they hate industry. They hate
advancement. They hate technology…Greens will lead us back to the stone ages.

And finally, how Congress pretended to make lobby reform. Ruth Marcus of the WaPo shows us the scum and how they did it, or didn't do it.

Washington has many ways of avoiding action while pretending the opposite.
Nearly all of them have been deployed in the cause of evading effective lobbying
reform:

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I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it.

John Stuart Mill (May 20 1806 – May 8 1873)