Have you noticed?

Despite how obvious it was that the Pentagon and the Bush Administration, in their most recent assessment of Bush’s big escalation of war in early 2007, were lying about how “peachy” the situation in Iraq is, all the Republican talking heads on TV now note that the surge worked, that this is indisputable fact, and that the only people who would claim Iraq isn’t going well are hateful, God-ridiculing Democrats.

They’ll claim this even when we see GI deaths going up again, larger and larger suicide bombings, on days when “insurgents” nearly blew up the First Lady of Iraq and days when they just sit back and watch “the American saviors” unintentionally kill a slew of civilians due to “bad intelligence.”

The worst part of all this, however, is that some of the relatively non-partisan news anchors and reporters don’t challenge the GOPers when they make this outrageous claim. A Republican strategist will let loose with the pronouncement of how wonderful Iraq is and, even if the headlines just reported another big bombing, the anchor sits without uttering a single question or asking the basis for such a preposterous claim.

One of our readers recommends this piece at Garling Gauge in reference to my post about the House of Representatives (almost exclusively Democrats voted nay) and its vote to reject the latest blank check George Bush demands to wage more war in Afghanistan and Iraq. (Thank you, reader!)

I think such a refusal is not only politically viable, I think it’s K-I-S-S and would have the support of the vast majority of the American people (since even former Bush supporters notice that for all of Bush’s previous claims to need the money for the GIs, our GIs and vets aren’t getting jack poop).

We haven’t heralded this move by House Democrats last week (joined by two whole Republicans) that kept Bush from getting another blank check from them (on our dime and the lives of our countrymen and women) to wage endless, pointless war. It brought cheers and happy tears from this progressive!

As noted, however, the battle isn’t over. The Senate could pass the latest Iraq-Afghanistan spending bill from Bush, which would bring it back to the House to work through, perhaps as a newly minted entity. And unless the bill is defeated by a LOT, Bush will veto anything that comes to him with less than he demands (the tin-plated God he thinks he is).

So give your support by telling your House and Senate reps to vote AGAINST more blank checks that do nothing but kill and maim Americans, Iraqs, and Afghans while making war profiteers like Bush and Cheney’s best friends even richer than they were before.

The IAVA - Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America - are pleading with the American public to contact their representatives and help push through a new GI Bill that:

…would substantially increase the educational benefits available to servicemembers who have served since September 11th, 2001. The bill would cover the cost of tuition up to the most expensive in-state public school and provide a living and book stipend, so that new veterans can focus on their educations and their readjustment to civilian life. It would also offer a more equitable benefit to National Guardsmen and Reservists than what is currently available. Furthermore, because the legislation is linked to the cost of higher education, it would keep its value over time.

John McCain, ironically, opposes this bill. Visit the site and make it happen.

“Wait, wait, you wanna find who? O-who? Osama-lama-ding dong? Ha ha, you…you. Are you messin’ with me? Really? He’s really around here somewhere? Oh, man, game over man! Game over! Heh heh, just kidding. Hey, relax, that’s just from Aliens. Bill Paxton n shit. You gonna pass that?”

I guess if you’re warring and you don’t want to war and you’ve got a steady supply of weed, that would provide an adequate form of escapism. Unfortunately, it would also - because of subtle differences in how it affects people - lead to everything from freakouts to complete apathy, all while bullets and bombs rained down. Now imagine you’re the British bloke in charge of these asshats.

Could this, perhaps, be one of the reasons we don’t know where Osama bin Laden is?

At least Morgan Spurlock is doing something about it.

Like filmmaker Robert Greenwald in his email alerting us to this, I wonder why Republican John McCain, the man we’re constantly reminded was a war heo despite his willingness to sacrifice others’ lives, isn’t supporting the new G.I. bill.

Sign the petition; learn about the bill and then, if you agree, sign the petition to demand McCain and others step up for those we encouraged to step up for Washington.

Well, the latest Bin Laden candygram criticizes Europe (going after Bush is just too easy a target for them, I think).

With so much focus on our endless war in Iraq, it can sometimes slip the mind that we have troops fighting and dying in Afghanistan as well. This report from The Real News Network sheds an eye-opening light on the current ongoings in the country and asks if there really is a military solution in the one place we’re pretty sure we were supposed to attack.

The Government of Canada has disclosed that the Canadian military in Afghanistan have stopped handing prisoners over to the government of Afghanistan after monitors found evidence that those prisoners were being abused and tortured.   Notably, this decision was made by the commander of Canadian forces in Afghanistan, and that person deserves another star… or whatever it is that signifies advancement in the Canadian Armed Forces.  Another maple leaf maybe?  Well another honorific insignia anyway!  But, as is my wont, I digress!

The prisoner transfers were stopped after Canadian monitors visited a prisoner who showed injuries from being beaten and given electric shocks. The monitors were actually able to find the instruments used to torture the prisoner after he told them to look under a chair in his cell, where they located an electric cord and a rubber hose. (more…)

Another example of one of the many, many reasons we need to remove ourselves from Iraq:

A defense contractor hired to repair combat equipment routinely failed to do the job right and then charged the government millions of dollars for the extra work needed to get the gear ready for battle in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a newly released audit.

Overall, the contractor’s employees at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait worked about 188,000 additional hours to fix Humvees, heavy transporters and fighting vehicles that allegedly were mended but flunked a military inspection, the Government Accountability Office said.

The GAO estimates the Army paid $4.2 million for the additional labor. Under the terms of the $581 million contract, the company is to be paid for all maintenance hours worked. That includes “labor hours associated with maintenance performed after the Army rejects equipment that fails to meet Army maintenance standards,” said the GAO, which is the investigative arm of Congress.

The contractor is not named in the GAO audit. The contract number is, however. The Federal Procurement Data System, a Web site that tracks government contracts, shows ITT Federal Services International of Colorado Springs, Colo., as the company performing the work.
…
The Army attributes the shoddy performance to flaws with the contractor’s quality control systems and its reliance on the military to point out what was wrong with the gear, according to the GAO. But auditors said the Army did a poor job of monitoring the company’s performance. That’s partly due to a shortage of qualified contracting personnel.

So the Army is doing a piss-poor job monitoring the company who is doing a piss-poor job and eating up millions of our dollars all the while. Aren’t there some kids who could use health care - or maybe just even a warm meal - somewhere? In this country?

OK, it’s very tempting: a Midwest man (Mark Deli Siljander of Michigan) who formerly served in Congress (as a Republican) and as a delegate to the United Nations has been charged with 42 - count ‘em - charges of funding and promoting terrorism. The righteous Republican tag makes me want to exploit this story for all it’s worth.

But here’s why I won’t.

First, there’s that strange notion of “innocent until proven guilty” that was hard hit even BEFORE the Bushies rode into office on a surplus of rigged electronic voting and almost completely eliminated now. But even that is not the only reason here I won’t take the bait.

Siljander has been charged for his efforts with the Islamic American Relief Agency which the feds claim funnels money to groups that have actually threated America and its war of empire in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. However, we’ve seen a BUNCH of such charges that, even when the feds DO manage to win in court, seem to be built on unsubstantiated so-called evidence. Outside the U.S., many courts throughout the very civilized world have, often using info “developed” by the Bushies, have failed to render guilty verdicts because of the speciousness of the charges and the evidence the cases are built upon.

As the Christian Science Monitor so WISELY opined soon after September 11th, 2001 when they decided to stop using the term “terrorist” to identify everyone the Bushies do not like, “one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.” This government is waging war on money going to every Muslim cause that isn’t directed at keeping the Bushies and American corporations in charge of the oil in Iraq and the huge oil pipeline planned to cross Afghanistan OR to promote the war Bush WANTS to have in Iran.

At the exact same time, this government turns a blind eye to fund raising for others who also might be construed as religious fascists; for example, it’s fine if you donate huge sums of money to some of the seriously rightwing “let’s get rid of these Muslims and anyone else of not-our-kind-of-Semite” groups in Israel. (Palestinians and others are also Semites, btw, which makes any criticism of the most rightwing of the Israeli government’s actions as “anti-Semitic” just because some of us want a fairness way beyond odd.) And Israel is just one example of the terrorists our government IS willing to support while condemning a select group of others.

Knowing how many charges have been brought by the highly politicized judicial system under Bush for reasons that have nothing to do with actual justice, I’m sorry but I don’t think anything they do stands up to the smell test.

IF Siljander’s group and Siljander himself actually are terrorists, then I have no problem with them being charged and prosecuted. But persecution just for being Muslim - to this Christian, me - just stinks. STOP ALL TERRORIST FUNDING and then apply the rules, or stop bringing charges only against CERTAIN parties. We still support, for example, many programs that help keep any Saudi but the Saud royal family in extreme poverty in ways most of the rest of the world sees as terrorism against the Saudi people but God forbid an Islamic charity does anything to feed and educate those poor.

In case you haven’t heard, Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have brought active-duty military GI and veteran suicides to some of the highest - if not THE highest, since the Bush Administration and the Pentagon have steadfastly ignored the issue altogether - levels on record. Here:

The parents of an Iraq war veteran who committed suicide and members of Congress on Wednesday questioned why there’s not a comprehensive tracking system of suicide among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

Mike Bowman, of Forreston, Ill., said his son, Spc. Timothy Bowman, 23, is a member of the “unknown fallen” not counted in statistics. His son, a member of the Illinois National Guard, took his own life in 2005 eight months after returning from war. Bowman said he considers his son a “KBA” — killed because of action.

“If the veteran suicide rate is not classified as an epidemic that needs immediate and drastic attention, then the American fighting soldier needs someone in Washington who thinks it is,” Bowman said.

I think it’s important to consider that IF Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney truly respected our American service men and women, many of them now vets, than they would NOT be talking about another bloody, useless, war without end with Iran - worse than our endless wars with Iraq and Afghanistan rolled together.

For an administration that has had a blank check and imperial powers, the Bushies can’t do anything right except for creating ever higher levels of grievous wrongs. Imagine what will happen when they move into Iran!

Not only does the Bush-led campaign in Iraq result in more U.S. and coalition deaths than ever in 2007 despite all the happy horseshit about the “grand success” of the “surge” to kill the insurgency; no, Bush has something else to boast about (and he’s enough of an ass to do so, too): this is our deadliest year for American troops in Afghanistan (remember them?) since we invaded in early October 2001.

And this distinction was earned BEFORE Pakistan fell apart to prop up Musharraf’s ego; with the chaos there now, one must assume that Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and friends have more room to manuever than ever.

The Bush Administration: fucking the world over since January 2001.

Reported on MSNBC by Keith Olbermann: The Bush Administration - supported by a rabid right who will cry long and hard about the “right to life” of barely multi-cell organisms - and the Pentagon now admit that they knew children were in the Afghanistan compound they bombed over the weekend, and decided to bomb anyway, killing at least 7-8 little kids.

While the children died, it seems that our bombs did NOT take out the so-called “high profile” Al Qaeda target they were aiming for. So I guess killing a bunch of toddlers is a “great” moment in the War on Terror.

From TPM Muckraker:

Many of the controversial interrogation tactics used against “war on terror” detainees in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan are similar to strategies the United States feared its worst enemies would use against captured soldiers during the Cold War.

Time magazine catches this connection in a recently declassified report, “Review of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse,” that has received little media coverage.

The same potential enemy tactics the U.S. military trained forces to face during the Cold War became interrogation strategies used on enemy combatants.

How can we expect to have American soldiers treated decently in enemy situations when we clearly do not follow any such mandate ourselves? Remember that U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales called the Geneva Convention “quaint” when telling the president it was fine and dandy if we tortured and otherwise abused even those detainees at Gitmo and elsewhere never charged.

A silent killer stalks American soldiers in Iraq, sometimes even following them home from the battlefield, and the Bush Administration does not want you to know about it. That killer is suicide. (more…)

…at least eight American GIs have died in Iraq over, for us, the Memorial Day weekend (while for the troops, I’m sure some saw this as Dante’s Inferno or at least hell on earth; and the Iraqi civilians aren’t happy either).

And yet, Bush will have more troops in Iraq by Christmas - many from units already having served multiple tours but forced into another year or so in Iraq - than we’ve EVER had. This isn’t a “surge” or “escalation”. This is a fight for empire that Bush simply won’t stop, regardless of how many soldiers and civilians die.

Right now, the country of Iraq is DOWN more than three million people from the time before the invasion when their population was around 25 million, a surprisingly large number of which were either fairly secular and some not-insignificantly in number Christians. Now do the math:

2 Million = the number the government (U.S. ‘cos we still control Iraqi govt) acknowledges/documents fled the country
2-5 Million = the number of Iraqi citizens believed may have made it out of Iraq via border-crossing routes then not controlled or loosely patrolled
1-6 Million = number of Iraqi civilians dead through U.S-to-Iraq and Insurgent-Iraq actions committed in the last 4+ years

This takes the total of Iraq civilian death/citizen flee numbers in Iraq at between a low of 5 million up to a potential high of 13 million. Out of a population starting the war at 25 million, these figures suggest that Iraq has lost between 20% and greater than 50% of its citizens. And notice I’m staying away from our devastation of the country of Afghanistan which I think was completely rubble-ized making the poverty-, war-, and quality-of-life there not meet the “standards of quality” required to be just “Stone Age”.

As we headed into the long Memorial Day weekend (which has more meaning than a day off and as much barbecue as you can pack in), there were four dominant stories in the media.

These stories were:

1. The so-called catfight between The View’s hosts Rosie O’Donnell and the human fulfillment of “the dumb blonde” joke, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, over the purported issue of “whether Rosie thinks America troops in Iraq are terrorists”
2. How the Democrats “bent over and spread ‘em” for Bush
3. Hillary Clinton “Exposed” As Calculating and Capable and how she just stayed with Bill for the sympathy vote when she ran for New York senator (and her worst crime, according to the Bushies and the media, is that Hillary WON)
4. Watch when a bird exacted some revenge by shitting all over The Commander-in-Cheat as he was giving a press conference telling us just how much he enjoyed making the Democrats “his bitch”

Notice any pattern here? Notice anything which seems like - except for #4 (divine providence, perhaps?) - a setup that Karl Rove could not miss (and should not, since it’s much of what Felonious Rove has been pulling since he hitched his star to Dubya).

The President held a joint press conference with Nato Secretary General de Hoop Scheffer which I believe holds a valuable lesson for the President in regards to the worlds opinion in the “war on terror”.

The President did not take long to bring up this struggle when the event started. Yet the entire focus for the President and Secretary in regards to the “war on terror” had to do with Afghanistan. Performing a search in the transcript of the event for the word Iraq will not yield one single result. Let me highlight this point: not ONCE does “Iraq” pass the lips of either man in that press conference. (more…)