by Anthony Ioven
 Anyone surprised that the military is trying to keep a lid on conditions at Walter Reed?
Walter Reed Patients Told to Keep Quiet
But that ain't all, folks:
Military Press Crackdown Extends Further Than Walter Reed
"It is starting to look like it is becoming a policy in some areas where [military officials] are not allowing reporters on the base unless it is an absolutely positively good news story. The military is making it harder and harder to do stories on bases...They are trying to censor the news, in this case it is bad news. The military has gone into a bunker mentality."
The last thing the military and this criminal administration want is to hear active-duty soldiers publicly telling it like it is. Dying for the sake of freedom is one thing. But speaking freely is verboten.
by Anthony Ioven
Nice to see today's Boston Globe underscore my post yesterday about the corrupting influence of money in politics:
Campaign contributions are rarely given out of altruism. Most sizeable donations are investments; the investors expect a return, and they usually get it.
Like I said yesterday, it's time to MOP things up.
by Anthony Ioven
Tom Vilsack is a s-l-o-w learner. It took him 56 years to figure out what most of us know by the time we're old enough to vote:
I ran up against something where good ideas, great effort, lots of hard work was simply not enough.
So much for the myth of the American Dream.
Yesterday, Vilsack dropped out of the presidential race because the money hurdle — $100 million seems to be the entry fee these days — was higher than he expected.
Time to wake up and smell the corruption, Tom. Politics in America is driven by Money. As Robert Byrd put it:
It is money, money, money! Not ideas, not principles, but money that reigns supreme in American politics.
We can change this ugly fact of political life if we choose to. And simply put, we can't get our country back until we do.
So let's do it. Who's stopping us? Let's take the Money Out of Politics. Here are some ways we can start to MOP things up:
 Restrict the length of campaigns — weeks, not years.
Ban political advertising.
Ban paid lobbying.
Ban political contributions by any entity except individuals.
Restrict how much a candidate can spend on an election, including the candidate's own money.
It doesn't have to take big bucks to run a political campaign. Newspaper articles, TV and radio debates, platform pamphlets, and web sites are just some of the relatively inexpensive ways the public can learn about candidates' ideas and experience.
America was founded on the principle that government should be by, of, and for the people. But somewhere along the way, that principle has been corrupted to government by, of, and for people with money. It doesn't have to be this way.
What ways can you suggest to MOP things up?
by Anthony Ioven
Don't you think you're a bit wiser now than you were, say, 48 years ago?
Were you even out and about way back then? If so, ask yourself this — suppose, back in those days, you had a nail sticking up from a floorboard in your house. You tried to fix it by screwing it in with a screwdriver. But it was, you know, a nail, so it didn't work.
But the next day, you tried screwing it in again. And the next day, and the next.
For forty-eight years.
At some point, wouldn't a sane and rational person say to himself — uh, hello, this isn't working — and give up? Not if you're like every American administration since JFK's. We've tried to make Castro screw by putting a stranglehold on his economy for 48 years. But it hasn't worked. Castro is still the head hombre.
The economic warfare we've waged against Cuba for nearly a half century has accomplished nothing except make the lives of generations of ordinary Cubans as miserable as possible.
 And yesterday, US Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez claimed that we can't even take responsibility for that. The decades of punishing economic sanctions we've imposed on the island are in no way responsible for the economic hardship there, insists the Cuban-born Gutierrez, without even wrinkling his mustache.
So let's see — 48 years of economic sanctions have yet to force Castro out, and they haven't even caused the Cubans' economic distress. So why does Gutierrez insist on staying this irrational course? Gutierrez:
The question is not when will the US change its policy. The question is when will the Cuban regime change its policy.
And, the Cuban regime's answer, Mr. Secretary, has been made loud and clear for lo these past 48 years — Screw you.
by Anthony Ioven
 In a longish but riveting post aptly called American Betrayal, David Michael Green finds plenty of blame to go around for these "last, sad years" in American history, years in which "the empire begins its slow descent." And during the unraveling:
...where were those who did know better, and why did they stand by and allow their life’s work and the country they loved to be ruined by the political equivalent of drunken adolescents operating heavy machinery?
When Green asks, "is there a greater shame imaginable," he is referring to craven Congressional partisans and Democrats in 2002 who "opted for the advancement of their own political careers over the literal lives of hundreds of thousands of people" by voting for the Iraq war resolution, just before the mid-term elections. But he is also referring to others who also knew better and should have stood up and spoken out, but didn't — for example, Colin Powell, for whom " the hottest place in Hell is being reserved," and Jerry Ford, who made his criticisms of the Iraq war "from the safety of his grave."
Ultimately,the responsibility lies with those who are most responsible for the actions of a democratic republic — you and me. Although Americans pay that idea respectful lip service, down deep not enough of us seem to believe it's actually true. Even many who criticize Bush and Co. the most regard this administration as an aberration, not a logical outcome of a deeply flawed system.
It's up to us to fix the system, and bring it into the 21st century. We need to end paid lobbying, for example. We need serious election reform. Abolish the Electoral College. Invent a mechanism to remove an out-of-control president without having to impeach him (although this one surely deserves impeachment).
But we won't do any of those things.
It's not the particular changes that we object to. It's the idea of change that we're afraid of. It may be "hopelessly foolish" of us to feel that way, but we "have been purposely trained to be so."
Be advised, Colin. It's going to get pretty crowded down there in the hottest place in hell.
by Anthony Ioven
Today's 246 to 182 vote in the House, approving a non-binding resolution that "disapproves" of President Bush's escalation of the war in Iraq, is a fraud. And a cynical and shameless one at that.
This resolution is nothing more than a chance to give Congressional Democrats — and a handful of Republicans — a vehicle to claim that they voted for the war before they voted against it. Nothing makes a politician's day like having it both ways.
Bush is a war criminal who deserves to be impeached, convicted, and sent to prison, not handed a toothless and weak-kneed rebuke.
But impeachment is simply not on the table. The pretenders in Congress continue to care much too much about their own careers, and much too little about the cost of Bush's crimes in terms of American and Iraqi lives.
by The Guests of 604
We humans like to think of ourselves as superior to all other creatures, in spite of considerable evidence to the contrary. As such, we are the earth's caretakers.
And we're not doing such a great job. We're not only making earth warmer, now it seems we're making microbugs stronger. Heckuva job, people.
And speaking of global warming, Ellen Goodman compares global warming deniers to Holocaust deniers.
bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Anyone who remembers the Russia-demonizing, shoe-banging 50s will see more than a little irony in Vladimir Putin warning the world about those reckless, war-crazed, out-of-control Americans.
bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Another handful of soldiers killed in Iraq? Tens of millions of Americans without health insurance? That's one thing. But this is what sells advertising.
bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Here's another indication of just how unpatriotic the Patriot Act really is. And IM-not-so-HO, the firings of the US attorneys is the same kind of hubris that afflicted Nixon and resulted in the Saturday Night Massacre.
bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Making it in America: the Little Golden Book of YES!.
by Anthony Ioven
Hillary tests the waters in Iowa. Obama wows 'em in New Hampshire. And Biden shoots himself in the foot.
And then there's this: In GOP presidential race, McCain slips; Giuliani gains luster.
Is the presidential election still in 2008, or did I miss the memo?
Running a two-year campaign is damn expensive. No wonder presidents end up deep in the hip pockets of the wealthy and powerful.
And no wonder so few people vote in presidential elections. By the time they actually roll around, twenty-one long months from now, everyone is pretty damn sick of it.
by Anthony Ioven
Despite warnings by former US military officials that military action against Iran would have "disastrous consequences," the good Christian soldiers in Washington seem "hell-bent" on marching off to war there:
The heaviest concentration of U.S. naval strike forces since the 2003 war against Iraq is concentrating off Iran...
[The US and Britain] are overflying Iran and probing its nuclear and military installations. The CIA and Britain's MI6 are stirring unrest among Iran's Kurds and Azerbaijanis, and arming Iranian Marxist and royalist exiles...
Half of the 21,000 additional U.S. troops headed to Iraq are being positioned to cover the Iranian border...
New contingents of U.S. Air Force personnel and warplanes are arriving at key forward air bases in Bulgaria and Romania that link the U.S. to the Mideast and Central Asia...
Turkey is being pressed to allow U.S. and Israeli strike aircraft to use its air space to attack northern Iran...
The U.S. Treasury has mounted a highly effective campaign to strangle Iran financially, seriously hurting its foreign banking connections, retarding industrial growth and energy production, and impeding foreign investment...
And all this while the US admits it has no evidence that Iran is helping the insurgents in Iraq:
Administration officials have long complained that Iran was supplying Shiite Muslim militants with lethal explosives and other materiel used to kill U.S. military personnel. But despite several pledges to make the evidence public, the administration has twice postponed the release — most recently, a briefing by military officials scheduled for last Tuesday in Baghdad.
"The truth is, quite frankly, we thought the briefing overstated, and we sent it back to get it narrowed and focused on the facts," national security advisor Stephen J. Hadley said Friday.
Translation: the facts aren't quite cooked yet.
We've seen this movie before.
by Anthony Ioven
Terrorist paralyzes Boston:
|
UpdateAmerica.com
604.UpdateAmerica.com
February's Posts
Shut Up and Smile, Soldier
Best Government Money Can Buy
Time to MOP Things Up
As the Screw Turns
Move Over, Colin
The Do Next-To-Nothing Congress
Wait - What Year Is This?
Shock and Awe - the Sequel
Boo
|