Palin Says We Need To Impose Sanctions On Iraq. Yikes!
Palin: Crack Down On ‘Iraq’ To Prevent Nuclear Iran
She also pronounces Ahmadinejad’s name wrong.
Sarah Palin has no understanding of foreign policy, economics, law, or pretty much anything that would even remotely qualify her to serve in public office. But she espouses love of God and country and that makes her good enough for right-wingers. She’s one of them.
It makes right-wingers feel good to see just an average Joe (or Jane in this case) in the national spotlight. It elevates their sense of self-worth. That’s why right-wingers loved George W. Bush. Although he came from a wealthy family, he showed them a facade of being just an ordinary guy without much education. And he was president. He was THEIR president. And that made them feel good.
With Obama, right-wingers see a highly educated, articulate, professor type, and that makes them uncomfortable. The fact that he’s black makes it even worse for their self-esteem. After all, they used to be able to blame their problems on poor people — mainly minorities, but now there’s a minority in the White House! It’s no wonder they’re so upset.
College Not Necessarily An Indicator For A Country’s Innovation And Economic Well Being
As this chart shows, Russia is ranked number one for pecentage of 25-34 year olds with higher degrees. Canada is second. Yet you don’t hear of a whole lot of innovation coming out of those countries. Russia is probably number one for computer espionage, hacking, virus creation, and other unsavory activities, and that could be considered innovation, but not exactly something a country should aspire to.
The U.S. in ranked 12th.
Do these rankings indicate the health or potential for innovation? We’ll try to find an answer to that question in the next post.
Palin’s Book Full Of Lies: “What Did You Expect? She’s A Conservative!”
WASHINGTON – Sarah Palin’s new book reprises familiar claims from the 2008 presidential campaign that haven’t become any truer over time.
Ignoring substantial parts of her record if not the facts, she depicts herself as a frugal traveler on the taxpayer’s dime, a reformer without ties to powerful interests and a politician roguishly indifferent to high ambition.
Palin goes adrift, at times, on more contemporary issues, too. She criticizes President Barack Obama for pushing through a bailout package that actually was achieved by his Republican predecessor George W. Bush — a package she seemed to support at the time.
To quote myself after hearing that Palin’s book should be in the fiction section: “What Did You Expect? She’s A Conservative!”
36% Of Weapons U.S. Sent To Afghanistan Are Missing
WASHINGTON (CNN) — More than one-third of all weapons the United States has procured for Afghanistan’s government are missing, according to a government report released Thursday.
The U.S. military failed to “maintain complete inventory records for an estimated 87,000 weapons — or about 36 percent — of the 242,000 weapons that the United States procured and shipped to Afghanistan from December 2004 through June 2008,” a U.S. Government Accountability Office report states.
The Defense Department spent roughly $120 million during that period to acquire a range of small arms and light weapons for the Afghan National Security Forces, including rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
[...]
The military is unable to provide serial numbers for 46,000 of the missing 87,000 weapons, the report concludes. No records have been maintained for the location or disposition for the other 41,000 weapons.
Source
What this means is, the insurgents we’ve been fighting in Afghanistan may be using our weapons to kill our troops. This is crazy. There were similar problems in Iraq with missing weapons, not to mention, 9 billion dollars unaccounted for.
It’s time to start looking back. There needs to be some accountability. We are a country of laws and no one is above the law, including the president.
Emotionalism vs. Pragmatism or Republican vs. Democrat – Part 1: Trying Khalid Shaikh Mohammed In Civilian Court
There has been a lot of criticism of the decision by Eric Holder to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in a N.Y. civilian court rather than in a military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay. (Contrary to right-wingers, Barack Obama didn’t make that decision.)
Holder was on the News Hour this evening and Jim Lehrer asked Holder to explain his decision. Holder consulted with a lot of people (no, Obama wasn’t one of them) and came to his decision after weighing all options. It wasn’t an easy decision. Despite all the evidence against Mohammed, there are many legal problems involved since he was tortured into talking. The confessions probably won’t be allowed to be used and Mohammed’s legal defense will surely focus on the issue of torture.
Trying Mohammed in a public criminal trial has the possibility of turning Mohammed into some kind of hero among Islamic extremists. On the other hand, we have the opportunity to see our legal system in action and no matter what the crime, everyone in the United States is granted due process of the law. This view requires some level of confidence in our legal system.
There is little to no chance that Mohammed could be found not guilty, but if he were, he would simply be charged with other crimes and would never be allowed to walk free.
News Hour commentators Mark Shields and David Brooks commented on Holder’s decision. Brooks made the case that the 9/11 attack was an act of war. That may be the whole problem with how we’ve handled the aftermath of 9/11. The Afghan government offered to try Osama bin-Laden in Islamic court immediately after the attack but George Bush turned down the offer. Now, eight years after the attack, bin-Laden remains at large. Instead, we waged war on the people of Afghanistan and probably created more terrorists than we’ve killed.
Imagine having a war fought in your name. The war in Afghanistan was a war on one man: Osama bin-Laden. Had we taken the other route — that of treating the 9/11 as a crime — bin-Laden wouldn’t have been elevated to the hero status of radical Islamics. He also wouldn’t have been elevated to the villain status which propelled Bush to hero status in the eyes of many here in the United States, mainly due to his emotional rhetoric. “You can run but you can’t hide.” “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.” “If America shows weakness and uncertainty, the world will drift toward tragedy. That will not happen on my watch.” These were the words Bush used in some of his speeches.
What if, instead, we did as Bill Clinton did with the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 and treated this as a crime rather than a war? Bin-Laden probably would have been lynched after a speedy trial. We could have used our newly formed alliance with nearly every country on earth to stamp out Islamic terrorism. We could have saved a trillion dollars that we’ve spent on the two wars, not to mention the nearly 5,000 lives of American soldiers and the 100s of thousands of Iraqi and Afghanistan civilian lives.
Of course, had we treated the 9/11 attack as a crime, right-wingers wouldn’t have gotten that warm and fuzzy feeling they get when they can hate and when they feel like they’re getting some kind of revenge. It goes back to the inferiority complex of a right-winger.
http://drudgeretort.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/the-inferiority-complex-of-a-right-winger/
Bush Unveils Institute And Think Tank – No, This Is Not From The Onion!
This is hilarious! A Bush think tank! lol!
In a speech at the institute today, Bush announced “The center will be a platform for us to continue our public service for the rest of our lives.”
Great. How about helping out another country for a while. America can’t survive any more of your help.
He said the institute will deal with an array of public policy issues, foreign and domestic, focusing on four broad areas including education, global health, freedom, and economic growth.
Well, since Bush is ALWAYS wrong, all we have to do is do the opposite.
George W. Bush Was Responsible For The Ft. Hood Shootings
The FBI knew that Nidal Malik Hasan had contact with al-Qaeda and was an extreme risk, but the military wasn’t alerted.
Much of the blame for 9/11 can be placed on poor communication between various agencies. They weren’t sharing intelligence information. Many problems incurred during the response to the attacks were also due to communication problems.
Bush vowed to remedy those problems but after over eight years, very little has been done. Intelligence never was given much importance in the Bush administration.
As with 9/11, there were plenty of warnings with the Ft. Hood shootings: Hasan made threats on the internet, he attended the same mosque at the same time as two of the 9/11 hijackers, and one of his projects in medical school stated the war on terror was a war against Islam. That’s all we know about so far.
So how is it that there were so many warning signs but Hasan was still scheduled to deploy to Iraq? Bad communication, mainly. Bush didn’t do his job. Perhaps Obama will recognize this as a high priority and do something.
Was Our Invasion of Afghanistan A Huge Mistake?
There’s widespread agreement that our invasion and occupation of Iraq was a mistake since the rationale was based on lies and false evidence, and because it turned into a costly quagmire with little benefit to our security. But what about Afghanistan? Was the U.S. invasion justified? At the time, most of the American public trusted the president’s judgment including all but one Congressman.
While it’s true that Osama bin-Laden had been operating out of Afghanistan, most of the planning for the 9/11 attacks were done in Germany. Bin-Laden and those who carried out the attacks were from Saudi Arabia. Al-Qaeda consisted of about 15,000 – 20,000 rouge fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan and bin-Laden, while having been successful in carrying out several attacks around the world, had not achieved world prominence.
Film critic Roger Ebert once said about heroes and villains in movies, “Each film is only as good as its villain.” Before 9/11, bin-Laden was definitely a menace, but hardly a villain worthy of starting two major wars costing a trillion dollars and thousands of soldiers lives.
After 9/11, we had the support of the world in going after those responsible for the attack. Even Iran was on our side. Had we gone after them methodically using our newly acquired allies, we could have hunted down bin-Laden and probably destroyed al-Qaeda. Actually, we didn’t even need to hunt down bin-Laden. The Taliban in Afghanistan offered to try bin-Laden under Islamic law, which can be extremely brutal in its punishments. The trial would have been on the world stage and justice more than likely would have prevailed.
Instead, Bush decided to elevate bin-Laden’s villain status and attempt to bomb Afghanistan out of existence. The evidence shows that Bush wasn’t even all that interested in capturing bin-Laden when our military had him cornered in Tora Bora. He was worth far more on the run to the Bush administration. It elevated the adversarial value of bin-Laden and elevated Bush’s hero status.
George W. Bush had plans to go into Iraq even before he become president. Once he took office, it only took about a month before he ordered the bombing of Iraq in an effort to antagonize Saddam Hussein into war. Hussein didn’t react. After 9/11, though, Bush was a hero and had the capital to go into Iraq. He also had the capital to pass huge tax cuts that resulted in the doubling of the U.S. debt.
We’re now in our ninth year of the war in Afghanistan. Bin-Laden remains at large. The two wars along with the tax cuts resulted in huge federal deficits. Our enormous debt is a bigger threat to our country than any terrorist attack.
Had Bush accepted the Taliban’s offer to try Osama bin-Laden in 2001, bin-Laden would probably have been executed by now. We wouldn’t be stuck in two quagmires that have made us less safe. And Nidal Malik Hasan wouldn’t have murdered 13 and injured 28 at Fort Hood a few days ago.
But trials don’t make for very interesting heroes.
Reagan Brought Down The Berlin War With Diplomacy, Not Threats
In his January 16, 1984 address, Reagan introduced a strategy for attaining cooperation and understanding between the superpowers. The first element of this strategy was the institutionalization of superpower dialog. “We must and will engage the Soviets in a dialogue as constructive as possible,” declared the only president in forty years never to have met his Soviet counterpart. “High level consultations should become a regular and normal component of U.S.-Soviet relations.” The aim of these meetings would be to reduce the threat of war and to rectify misunderstandings. “We seek genuine cooperation and cooperation begins with communication,” Reagan announced, “In our approach to negotiations, reducing the risk of war — and especially nuclear war — is priority number one.” Notably, the president did not link these talks to changes in Soviet international behavior. This directly contradicted the administration’s earlier position on summit meetings.
Reagan’s call for dialogue held a sense of urgency, as was evident in his assertion that Washington “must and will” enter into talks with the Kremlin. The president also proclaimed, “The fact that neither of us like the other’s system is no reason not to talk. Living in the nuclear age makes it imperative that we do talk.”
Tea-bag Protesters Were Bussed In Free Of Charge By Americans For Prosperity
The tea-baggers like to call themselves a grass-roots organization, but they’re really an astroturf organization funded by billionaire David Koch and others. And who is this David Koch? Well, he is a co-owner of a giant oil and gas conglomerate. Surprise, surprise.
Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the corporate front group founded in the 1980s by Koch Industries billionaire David Koch, worked closely with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) to orchestrate the anti-health reform rally today. As ThinkProgress reported yesterday, AFP has been encouraging right-wing activists to board their buses — free of charge — to attend the rally. While AFP does not disclose all of its corporate donors, foundations controlled by David and Charles Koch provide millions in yearly funding, and David continues to chair the AFP foundation and preside over AFP’s annual convention.
