We Fight Low Information
How worried should Americans be about the drug wars being fought just across the border? Under the Merida Initiative, the Bush administration committed $1.4 billion in military assistance to Mexico and the Senate is now considering a House move to increase this year’s figure by $410 million. This seems as foolhardy to me as the [...]
The American people’s faith in their government—even with the election of Barack Obama—remains compromised. One reason is obvious. Americans see low-level military operatives being imprisoned for mistreatment, even murder, of prisoners. At the same time, high-level officials go uninvestigated and unpunished. In their case, we’re told to look forward rather than backward, an empty phrase [...]
At his press conference on Monday, President Barack Obama had to remind Mara Liasson of Fox News and NPR that it was the Republicans who doubled the national debt over the past eight years and it’s a little strange to be hearing lectures from them now about how to be fiscally responsible. That interchange was [...]
They are trying so very hard it is almost sad, in a way—were it not for all the broke people, and scared people. And dead people. It’s the Bush people, including Mr. Bush himself, trying to gather up some shreds of dignity before they are out the door. Their final con game: “We did a [...]
Every Friday the LA Progressive features a comment that was particularly noteworthy. This week we are featuring a comment submitted by Zenith in response Eric Schneider’s “The War on Drugs Redux.” Zenith writes: I have to disagree that the methadone experiemnt prved less promising than expected, or that it was “failing”. In fact MMT is [...]
by David Swanson – The wonderful thing about big lies is their kettle logic. The term, of course, derives from the story of the man who offered several mutually incompatible excuses for returning his friend’s kettle in damaged condition: “It broke too easily.” “It was like that when I got it.” “I improved it for [...]
by Charley James – John McCain lost the presidential election only because the Obama landslide was greater than Republican operatives anticipated and local GOP apparatchiks weren’t vigilant enough in preventing legitimate voters from casting ballots. And when informed by field offices of a potential voting rights problem, Attorney General Michael Mukasey reportedly chose not to [...]
by Denis Campbell – Since he truly cares not a whit, let’s plan a real tone deaf legacy tour for George Bush and the team. The only thing missing from the current trip is bomber tour jackets made by Bangladeshi school children earning $1 a week in wages. Is it possible for one man to [...]
by Charley James – Where is a pair of dirty, old shoes when I need them? I want to hurl a pair after it became official yesterday when reality was confirmed by no less a reliable White House source than the president himself. George Bush summed up his view of how his policies affected the [...]
Every Friday the LA Progressive features a comment that was particularly noteworthy. This week we are featuring a comment submitted by George in response to Gene Rothman’s Obama’s Faith-Based Initiative: The Devil Is in the Details: Writes George, “The solution to all of the difficulties of the centerpiece and entirety of Bush’s original putative philosophical [...]
by Joseph Palermo – In yet another cynical ploy from the good offices of the George W. Bush Administration, we are now told that after “tough” negotiations the Iraqi Parliament has approved a December 31, 2011 exit date for American combat troops.
by John Paul Rossi – The other week, the appeal of the Big Three’’s executives for a $25 billion taxpayer bailout for their desperately ailing firms failed. Neither the fractious lame duck Congress, nor the Bush administration were willing to help.
When the Bush administration came up with a special classification, “enemy combatant,” and a special site—Guantánamo—to put prisoners beyond the purview of human and legal rights, I had a shock of recognition. The trial run had taken place right here in the US when we threw due process out the window for that other special [...]
This Democratic victory should be seen primarily as a rejection of the sectarian conservatism of the George W. Bush Administration. There is certainly a mandate to reimpose sensible regulation on the economy, to do something (exactly what is not so clear) about a failing health care system, and to find a way out of Iraq. [...]
In the battle for endorsements in the presidential campaign, Barack Obama snared a strong nod from former Secretary of State Colin Powell and John McCain received an equally strong recommendation from al-Qaeda.
“When we elect Barack, knock on wood, we will have someone who responds to labor, to people’s needs, the plight of immigrants, but he can’t win change alone it will take a larger movement,” said Maria Elena Durazo, leader of the 840,000-member Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. One of the most successful and dynamic [...]
by Charley James – It might be the supreme, ironic, twist of Republicans efforts to keep people from voting. It turns out that Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher – the infamous Joe the Plumber – may not be able to vote.
President Barack Obama will face a daunting international scene in January as a direct consequence of George Bush’s ill-conceived adventure in Iraq. Having argued forcefully that the war should never have been fought, and having committed himself to a “responsible” withdrawal, Obama will indeed inherit responsibility for Iraq.
There is an “Alice-in-Wonderland” quality to the current debate on Iraq. As the war became increasingly unpopular after 2003, the Bush administration took to arguing that we couldn’t leave because it wasn’t going well. We had a duty to hang in there and give the Iraqis a chance to get on their feet. Those of [...]
by John Peeler – The recent crisis between Georgia and Russia, and the ineffectually truculent response of the Bush administration, illustrate the utter bankruptcy of the Bush foreign policy, and the need for a fundamental reexamination. At the same time, there is little in the campaign rhetoric of Barack Obama — and none whatever in [...]
by Jules R. Benjamin – Has George W. Bush surged to victory in Iraq? If so, he can thank Iraqi tribalism, the success of ethnic cleansing, the loss of legitimacy by Al Qaida in Iraq, the “standing down” of the Sunni militias and Iran’s willingness to let its friends in Baghdad make their own peace [...]
Nancy Pelosi thanked her host, American Jewish University, proclaimed her support for Israel as a Jewish state, and then talked about the importance of women owning their power – this from the woman who upon assuming her role as Speaker of the House declared impeachment off the table, thus immediately surrendering her power to hold [...]
Many opponents of the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq have always argued that this conflict is an irrelevant and even counterproductive sideshow to the real “war on terrorism” in Afghanistan. In fact, Barack Obama led the parade to initiate a troop surge in Afghanistan after having opposed it in Iraq.
It really makes the Iraq debate easy for John McCain when he throws around words like “win” and “victory” and “prevail” and “success” without really defining what they mean. A short time ago he was calling for American troops to remain in Iraq forever and that Obama was “naive” for suggesting otherwise. Now that the [...]
by Hal Brands — On June 30, President Bush signed into law an initiative called Plan Merida, a $465-million program designed to help Mexico deal with the unchecked drug trafficking and violence that have recently turned much of the U.S.-Mexican border into a war zone.
As a 91-year-old U.S. Army retiree, I believe I am entitled to present a long view of our war (invasion) in Iraq. I was born the year we joined our allies in World War I, I fought in World War II, was recalled to duty in the Korean Conflict, and watched my oldest son go [...]
I’ve been watching a parade of slapstick worthy of the Keystone Kops lately, but it’s not on Vintage Movie Night — it’s in Washington DC. Hapless doesn’t even begin to describe it.
In Boumediene v. Bush, the Supreme Court gave the Bush administration a black eye in its controversial war-on-terrorism policies. The Court held that the Guantanamo detainees have a right to pursue habeas corpus challenges to their detention. The alternative procedures to habeas review crafted by the government under the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, the [...]
The lonely highways of America will grow even more desolate as fuel prices continue to rise with no end in sight. Day by day, the number of “for lease” and “going out of business” signs escalate in communities throughout the country.
Mr. Russert, last Sunday (June 1, 2008), on “Meet The Press” you had as your guest former George W. Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan. You asked him the following question: “Some have suggested because you were part of the propaganda machine that sold the war, that many people have died and been injured because of [...]
Michael Sigman: For many old-media types I talked to, there was more resignation than outrage this time around, as though a cherished institution were already gone.
Julie Driscoll: Students and their parents’ only hope is Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown, two Democratic Senators who have the cojones to take on big banks, Wall Street, and the powers that be.
Berry Craig: Called the “Ride for Respect,” the demonstration at Walmart corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, will be modeled on civil rights volunteers who rode buses into the South in the 1960s to protest Jim Crow racial injustice.
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