Matt Taibbi: I had been attending the Cornerstone Church for weeks, but this was really my first day of school. I had joined Cornerstone -- a megachurch in the Texas Hill Country -- to get a look inside the evangelical mind-set that gave the country eight years of George W. Bush. The church's pastor, John Hagee, is one of the most influential evangelical preachers in the country -- not because his ministry is so very large (although he claims up to 4.5 million viewers a week for his Sunday sermons) but because of his near-absolute conquest of a very trendy niche in the market: Christian Zionism. The whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align America with the nation of Israel so as to "hurry God up" in his efforts to bring about Armageddon.
Do white right-wing preachers have it easier than black left-wing preachers? Is there a double standard?
The political explosion around the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was inevitable, given Wright's personal closeness to Barack Obama and the outrageous rubbish the pastor has offered about AIDS, 9/11 and Louis Farrakhan.
After Wright's bizarre and narcissistic performance at the National Press Club on Monday, Obama would have looked weak and irresolute had he not denounced him. But if there was a moment of courage in this drama, it was not Obama's condemnation of Wright but his earlier and now much-criticized effort to avoid a complete break with his unapologetic pastor.
In a new memoir, the former commander of US forces in Iraq provides new details of the goings-on at high levels of the Bush Administration in the first year of the Iraq war. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez' conclusion: "Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were unnecessarily spent, and worse yet, too many of our most precious military resource, our American soldiers, were unnecessarily wounded, maimed, and killed as a result. In my mind, this action by the Bush administration amounts to gross incompetence and dereliction of duty."
McCain's Achilles' heel has always been his policy oscillations. His limber "principles" allow him to sweep from one side of an issue to another; they are generally lauded as badges of maverickness in the press and recognized by the reality-based community largely as panderiffic moments of Washington as usual. And until now, because the traditional media has refused to properly cover these flip-flops and distortions, McCain has been able to get away with saying one thing and doing another, or voting one way and soon thereafter voting another. But how will the real McCain -- whiplash policy McCain -- play out in 2008, where video and blogs will be able to juxtapose his stances and statements in such a manner that shatters the myth of McCain as an "honest broker"?
Perhaps more shocking than any of this was the accusation from Barry Halley, a former project manager for Worldwide Network Services, a Washington, D.C.-based firm that was working on subcontract for DynCorp. According to Halley, his site manager in Iraq, who he said was employed by a "major defense contractor," moonlighted as the leader of a prostitution ring serving American contractors in Iraq that indirectly caused the death of a colleague. "A co-worker unrelated to the ring was killed when he was traveling in an unsecure car and shot performing a high-risk mission," he told the committee. "I believe that my co-worker could have survived if he had been riding in an armored car. At the time, the armored car that he would otherwise have been riding in was being used by a manager to transport prostitutes from Kuwait to Baghdad."
On September 18, 2006 John Hagee appeared on the WHYY radio show "Fresh Air", and the recorded show segment [PDF of transcript] began with an audio excerpt from one of Hagee's recorded sermons in which Hagee enthusiastically declares that envisioned chain of events he expects will follow a US and/or Israeli attack on Iran, which include "Ezekiel's War" and the "Rapture", would be "thrilling". Hagee proceeded to state, in the interview with Terry Gross, that during "Ezekiel's War" that God will cause a Russian nuclear strike on America that will destroy the East and West coasts.
The Federal Reserve and other regulators initiated steps Friday to end "unfair and deceptive" credit card industry practices assailing consumers who are already struggling to cope in a bad economy. The proposed rules would be the biggest clampdown on the industry in decades, aiming at protecting people from credit card companies that arbitrarily raise interest rates or don't give borrowers adequate time to pay their bills.
Robert Parry: One of the advantages that the American right has achieved from investing tens of billions of dollars in media is the ability to define what is and what isn't a "scandal," a powerful factor in determining who wins national elections. While Barack Obama has to explain what he knew and when he knew it about the angry sermons of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the Bush family floats above its financial and political associations with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a South Korean theocrat who had denounced the United States as "Satan's harvest" and likened American women to prostitutes. In his angry sermons, Moon has vowed to sweep aside American democracy and individualism as he builds a one-world state.
read moreMatt Taibbi: Of the three candidates, no one can touch Hillary Clinton for her expertise in dispensing federal pork. She is fast becoming a sort of Heavyweight Earmark Champion of the Beltway -- one think-tank analyst has even dubbed her the "Queen of Pork" -- who excels as a favor trader not only in sheer quantity but in brazenness as well.
The battle over dioxin contamination in this economically stressed region had been raging for years when a top Bush administration official turned up the pressure on Dow Chemical to clean it up.
On Thursday, following months of internal bickering over Mary Gade's interactions with Dow, the administration forced her to quit as head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Midwest office, based in Chicago.
Gade told the Tribune she resigned after two aides to national EPA administrator Stephen Johnson took away her powers as regional administrator and told her to quit or be fired by June 1
In Basra alone, police acknowledge that 15 women a month are murdered for breaching Islamic dress codes. Others say the number is higher. At first glance Shawbo Ali Rauf appears to be slumbering on the grass, her pale brown curls framing her face, her summer skirt spread about her. But the awkward position of her limbs and the splattered blood reveal the true horror of the scene. The 19-year-old Iraqi was, according to her father, murdered by her own in-laws, who took her to a picnic area in Dokan and shot her seven times. Her crime was to have an unknown number on her mobile phone. Her "honor killing" is just one in a grotesque series emerging from Iraq, where activists speak of a "genocide" against women in the name of religion.
A giant inflatable pig that went missing from a Southern California music festival at the weekend has been found in tatters in a desert town.
The pig, which has been a signature Pink Floyd stage prop since its appearance on the 1977 cover of "Animals" and the song "Pigs on Wings," broke away from its tethers on Sunday night at Coachella Valley Arts and Music Festival.
The festival organizers offered a $10,000 reward for the two-story inflatable pig belonging to ex-Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters.
Two couples said on Wednesday they had found the shredded plastic remains of the pig outside their homes.
In the country of its birth, Wal-Mart is wrecking havoc with worker
standards of living. It forces other large grocery chains to demand from
their unionized employees lower wages and benefits to be able to compete
with Wall-Mart's race to the bottom. This direction is a historically tragic
reverse for the U.S. economy that before World War II featured rising wages
that increased consumer demand and improved livelihoods.
Increasingly, Wal-Mart's immense arc of influence here is pushing wages and
benefits downward. With hundreds of thousands of its nearly 1.4 million
workers making under $7.50 an hour, before payroll deductions, (the average
wage is between $7.50 and $8.50 an hour), the average-on-the-clock workweek
is only 32 hours. Since Wal-Mart defines anyone working fewer than 34 hours
per week as part-time, they have to wait for two years before qualifying for
health insurance whose co-payment takes one-fifth of the average paycheck.
Get the idea of what is meant by the Wal-Mart way.
Waiting periods are key to Wal-Mart's phony health insurance boasting in
their television ads. Impoverished employees dont stay, with turnover rates
for these hourly employees at 50 percent to 100 percent at many stores.
Wal-Mart is devilishly ingenious in thinking up ways to have taxpayers fill
in its wage gap. Put them on partial welfare, says the very well paid
company bosses who make millions of dollars each per year. These workers are
given advice on how to apply so that taxpayers subsidize Wal-Marts profits.
For example, in Georgia, over 10, 261 children of Wal-Mart employees are
enrolled in the states Peachcare program for health insurance in families
meeting federal poverty criteria.
According to the report, Everyday Low Wages, one 200-person Wal-Mart store
could cost federal taxpayers over $420,000 per year. These costs include
subsidized lunches, health insurance and housing assistance, federal tax
credits and deductions for low-income families, among other examples of
Wal-Mart's freeloading.
Enough is never enough for this corporation. It often demands substantial
local tax breaks from municipalities as a condition for locating there.
Although successful local opposition is blocking dozens of Wal-Mart location
plans, this corporate welfare King still manages to escape its fair share of
taxes, while local home owner and small businesses ante up for local public
services and assume Wal-Mart's share. That is, small businesses that manages
to remain in the hollowed out Main Streets that are the aftermath of a
Wal-Mart opening. Minimal thinking by consumers say Wal-Mart is a bargain;
maximum thinking starts adding up the local, national and global costs of
this Goliath depressor of purchasing power by workers.
www.organicconsumers.org
Why does the right want Joe Sixpack to be dirt poor?
There was no shortage of Guardsmen,nor anything else.
Is that so? The guardsmen say otherwise. Nice try though.
In interviews, Guard commanders and state and local officials in Louisiana said the Guard performed well under the circumstances. But they say it was crippled in the early days by a severe shortage of troops that they blame in part on the deployment to Iraq of 3,200 Louisiana guardsmen. While the Pentagon disputes that Iraq was a factor, those on the ground say the war has clearly strained a force intended to be the nation's bulwark against natural disasters and terrorist attacks.
Reinforcements from other states' National Guard units, slowed by the logistics and red tape involved in summoning troops from civilian jobs and moving them thousands of miles, did not arrive in large numbers until the fourth day after the hurricane passed. The coordinating task was so daunting that Louisiana officials turned to the Pentagon to help organize the appeal for help.
At the convention center, 222 soldiers trained in levee repair, not police work, locked themselves into an exhibit hall at the convention center rather than challenge an angry and desperate crowd of more than 10,000 hurricane victims at the center.
The near-total collapse of communications made every task far more difficult, forcing some Guard commanders to use "runners, like in World War I," as one put it. With landlines, cellphones and many satellite phones out of action, the frequencies used by the radios still functioning were often so jammed that they were useless.
Disaster experts said that even with perfect planning and management, the 5,700 Louisiana National Guard troops available were far too few.
www.nytimes.com
isn't every wave, earthquake and sneeze caused by GM?
What does General Motors have to do with this?
Rightwingdouche: It was the Crawford Cumguzzler who
is at fault for sending the Louisiana Nation Guard to Iraq. Nice try fucktard.
The 3,700 Louisiana National Guard members in Iraq will begin heading home within about a week as part of normal troop rotations, but there are no mass Guard movements back to the United States planned to aid hurricane relief, U.S. military officials in Baghdad said Thursday.
"Everyone we have here, and every piece of equipment we have here, is needed here," said Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, senior spokesman for U.S. forces in Iraq.
www.washingtonpost.com
So it turns out that Blair, Chimpy's little lap dog, is every bit the lying sack of shit that the deciderer is.
Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.
The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass graves.
In that publication - Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: 'We've already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.'
On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted on the Labour party website that: 'The remains of 400,000 human beings [have] already [been] found in mass graves.'
The admission that the figure has been hugely inflated follows a week in which Blair accepted responsibility for charges in the Butler report over the way in which Downing Street pushed intelligence reports 'to the outer limits' in the case for the threat posed by Iraq.
www.guardian.co.uk
All this may sound like ancient history. But it's from the same era as the bombings Ayers helped carry out as a member of the Weather Underground. And Liddy's penchant for extreme solutions has not abated.
In 1994, after the disastrous federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, he gave some advice to his listeners: "Now if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they're going to be wearing bulletproof vests. . . . Kill the sons of bitches."
He later backed off, saying he meant merely that people should defend themselves if federal agents came with guns blazing. But his amended guidance was not exactly conciliatory: Liddy also said he should have recommended shots to the groin instead of the head. If that wasn't enough to inflame any nut cases, he mentioned labeling targets "Bill" and "Hillary" when he practiced shooting.
Given Liddy's record, it's hard to see why McCain would touch him with a 10-foot pole. On the contrary, he should be returning his donations and shunning his show. Yet the senator shows no qualms about associating with Liddy--or celebrating his service to their common cause.
How does McCain explain his howling hypocrisy on the subject? He doesn't. I made repeated inquiries to his campaign aides, which they refused to acknowledge, much less answer. On this topic, the pilot of the Straight Talk Express would rather stay parked in the garage.
That's an odd policy for someone who is so forthright about his rival's responsibility. McCain thinks Obama should apologize for associating with a criminal extremist. To which Obama might reply: After you.
www.chicagotribune.com
Deborah Jeane Palfrey, known as the "D.C. Madam," once implied that suicide was cowardice but, in the end, she seems to have chosen that same path herself. "She wasn't going to jail, she told me that very clearly. She told me she would commit suicide," author Dan Moldea told TIME soon after news broke of her body being found in Tarpon Springs, Florida, an apparent suicide. Palfrey's body, along with a handwritten suicide note, was discovered by police in a storage area attached to her mother's mobile home. Palfrey contacted Moldea last year to provide her help writing a book. "She had done time once before [for prostitution]," Moldea recalls. "And it damn near killed her. She said there was enormous stress -- it made her sick, she couldn't take it, and she wasn't going to let that happen to her again." Palfrey had been free pending her scheduled July 24 sentencing on a series of racketeering and money laundering charges as part of running a prostitution ring that had as clients many prominent Washingtonians, including Senator David Vitter of Lousiana. She faced as many as 55 years behind bars (though sentencing guidelines could well have limited her prison time to a maximum of 71 months.)
www.time.com
Those disappointing numbers probably wiped the smile right off of fat bastard's face.
leftwingconspiracy.com
100 more years but only if no American soldiers are killed.
Posted by YoMeLIB at 2008-05-01 07:18 PM
The 100 year McCain ad seems to be working.No wonder the cancervatards are whining.
weblogs.chicagotribune.com
On the 5th anniversary of President Bush's heroic landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln and speech before the Mission Accomplished banner, the White House has admitted that the banner could have been "more specific." To mark the anniversary, spokesperson Dana Perino announced that the White House will be holding a contest for families and friends of the over 4,000 soldiers who have perished, and the more than 50,000 who have been maimed since the original Mission Accomplished banner was unfurled, asking them to come up with a more specific banner.
"President Bush has always been a lemons into lemonade guy," said spokesperson Dana Perino. "He sees the contest as a way to comfort those in the military who might have thought the banner meant their lives would be safe and they would be returning to their families whole."
"We're looking for it to be fun," added Perino. "Something that both defines what has actually taken place since the President said, 'Major combat operations in Iraq have ended,' while at the same time absolves the President from any direct responsibility for the shitstorm that his actions have caused."
Some of the early entries includes...
"Huge Defense Contracts and Profits For Halliburton, Blackwater, other friends of Bush/Cheney Built On The Graves of Innocents Accomplished"
"Generating a Smokescreen to Cover up the Disembowelment of Federal Departments and Their Conversion to Partisan Operations - i.e. EPA, Justice, Housing - Accomplished"
"Protection of Osama Bin Laden by Diverting Resources from Finding Him and Those Who Were Actually Behind 9-11 Accomplished"
"Increasing Foreign Tourism by Weakening the Dollar to the Point That it Is Cheaper for the French, English and Germans to Fly Here to Do Their Christmas Shopping Than to Go to Their Local Mall Accomplished."
"Going to War With The President You Have, Not The President You'd Like Accomplished"
"Bringing Together Families in Unanticipated Ways With Widows (And Widowers) and Their Children Get to Move in with Their Own Parents in Order to Survive Life as Single-parents as Well as Families Getting to Spend More Time than Ever with Their Grown Children Now That They Get to Visit Them at Their Hospital and Rehab Facility Accomplished"
First prize: John McCain's 100 More Years In Iraq Banner!
Have fun kids!
www.smirkingchimp.com
Here's a good link debunking the "tax cuts pay for themselves" crapola.
www.cbpp.org