Senator McCain Cuts and Runs, Governor Palin's "Labor" Day, and a New Hurricane Called, Um, Ike? Who Writes This Stuff?
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008
Well, I guess God got my email and answered my prayer. Man, the power of the Internet! He even emailed me back! I'll share that with you in the next few days. Proof there is a God in heaven? Never explain comedy or satire or the ironic comment. Those who get it, get it. Those who don't, never will...
John McCain said "it's time to take our Republican hats off and put our American hats on." Really? It would have been nice if Sen. McCain had put on his American hat in the three years since Katrina. Just so no one is fooled by all his fake concern for the people on the Gulf Coast, let's look at his record post-Katrina, compliments of Chris Hayes of The Nation: If (McCain) cared about New Orleans and the Gulf Coast he could have done something these past three years. He could have made Gulf Reconstruction his issue, he could have excoriated his party for pushing federal dollars into the hands of cronies, for providing inadequate resources, for allowing the further destruction of the wetlands that serve as the only natural barrier to storm surges. He could have taken on the insurance companies that have been serially screwing the residents of the gulf. But he was too busy pushing for more troops, and more war and running for president. Instead this is his record [via Mother Jones]:
[INDENT]Though McCain issued a statement the next week (after Katrina) calling on Congress to make sacrifices in order to fund recovery efforts, he was quoted in The New Leader on September 1 [2005] cautioning against over-spending in support of Katrina's victims. "We also have to be concerned about future generations of Americans," he said. "We're going to end up with the highest deficit, probably, in the history of this country." [/INDENT][INDENT]That attitude was borne out in McCain's actions and votes. Forty Senators and 100 members of Congress visited New Orleans before he did; he finally got there in March 2006. He voted against establishing a Congressional commission to examine the Federal, State, and local responses to Katrina in med-September 2005. He repeated that vote in 2006. He voted against allowing up to 52 weeks of unemployment benefits to people affected by the hurricane, and in 2006 voted against appropriating $109 billion in supplemental emergency funding, including $28 billion for hurricane relief. [/INDENT]So honestly, it's an insult to watch him make a show of concern now. ...
The possibility of a storm (a storm that never hit New Orleans, and was no longer a hurricane by last night) was enough for McCain to essentially cancel most of the first day of the convention. Cut and run? The AP reported yesterday that conventions have always been held when the nation was facing perilous moments. Right smack in the middle of World War II, the Republicans and the Democrats both held full conventions. Thousands of Americans were being killed every week. The Republicans held their convention in Chicago less than two weeks after D-Day. No one faulted them for that. In fact, it made Americans feel good that, no matter what happens, NOTHING stops Democracy. No retreat, no surrender...
So McCain and company used the hurricane for political advantage, to have an excuse to not have Bush and Cheney live and in person in St. Paul (Bush will appear Tuesday night via satellite). And he used the hurricane as a chance to release a potentially controversial story in the hopes that the hurricane would dominate the news and not many would notice. One hour after Gustav hit land, the McCain campaign announced that Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's teenage daughter is pregnant. I don't want to say much more beyond this, as I agree with Barack Obama that "people's families are off limits, and people's children are especially off limits."
I do feel very sorry that this minor, this child, now has to have her privacy sacrificed because her mother accepted an offer to run for VP. Obama's right -- the children are off limits. I remember when John McCain cruelly trashed Chelsea Clinton when she was a child in the White House. He told reporters that she was "ugly" "because Janet Reno is her father." Of course, McCain would like us now to accord Palin's daughter the respect he wouldn't give Chelsea.
This does not mean that a discussion about the stupidity of "abstinence-only" sex ed classes is off the table; nor should we not talk about the right of a teenager to terminate a pregnancy (a right that has been essentially eliminated as the Supreme Court believes forcing a child to have a child against its will is not a form a child abuse), or Gov. Palin's desire to make abortion illegal for anyone who is raped, a victim of incest or who may die if they bring the fetus to term. She's "proud" of her daughter's "decision to have her baby." Uh-huh. Ok...
Word comes tonight that McCain's people lied about Palin being vetted -- the FBI has admitted they did NOT vet her. So McCain has dispatched ten operatives and investigators to Alaska to find out if there's anything else that's about to hit the fan regarding his veep pick, a woman he had run into only once in his life and then called her on her cell phone two weeks ago at the Alaska State Fair. That was it before she made the short list and was selected. McCain's radar -- honed perhaps during his own self-admitted indiscretionary phase of his life -- is telling him there's more to the Palin story. You mean things like her support of the Alaska Secessionist Party or being one of the directors of recently-arrested Sen. Ted Stevens' political action groups? Heck, I dunno. We shall see...
But before everyone gets all smug and self-righteous about the Palin selection, remember where you live. You live in a nation of gun owners and hunters. You live in a country where one out of three girls get pregnant before they are 20. You live in a nation of C students. Knocking Bush for being a C student only endeared him to the nation of C students. Knock Palin for having kids, for having a kid who's having a baby, for anything that is part of her normalness -- a normalness that looks very familiar to so many millions of Americans -- well, you do this at your own peril. Assuming she's still on the ticket two weeks from now, she will be a much tougher opponent than anyone expects. You live in a country that voted for Dan Quayle.
I'll close with this report on ABC tonight by investigative reporter Brian Ross. It shows Republicans in St. Paul taking off their Republican hats and putting on their American hats. In the meantime they should keep those hats ready as a new hurricane was announced today. No, not Hannah. She's already on her way to Florida for Friday. The new one is called Ike, scheduled to hit the Gulf early next week. Ike. He's the one who warned us about the "military-industrial complex."
More to come...
Michael Moore MMFlint@aol.com MichaelMoore.com
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January: +4.45 units, February: +.39 units, March +3 units, April +1.29 units, May +2.08 units, June +15.02 units, July +.4 units, August +.54 units, September +4.63 units, October +3.25 units, November +1.80 units (15 winning months in a row)
Excuse me while I put on my "you got to be sh itting me" hat. Unlike the the good Senator, I wear my 'American hat' everyday, not only when it's convenient.
From my sources inside the McCain camp: Senator McCain is planning on flying a plane into the bayou with a liter of Evian and a box of Twinkies this week while his forces on the ground try to find some more floating corpses (from 3 years ago) to spell out "Mission Accomplished".
9-07-08 The Holy Ghost may be coming to your town!!!!!! Be sure to bring your tambourine. This rival will be brought to by Palin and God, to see what other country we need to invade looking for "WMD's" Onward Christian soldiers marching off to war, looking and killing for those "WMD's, under the mighty lord. Dont forget,we will be speaking in tongues directed by the Holy Ghost. Please dont hold it against me!!! Buy your tikets now, they are going fast !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!! America, a weapons producing nation under Jesus!!! How blessed we must be !!!!!!!!!!!!!
I consider myself a moderate as well, so I try not to act overly partisan, but do note, it is only fair to say that McCain has surged in the polls very quickly and leads most national polls currently (remember he was down by an average of 7 points nationally prior). Heck, USA Today had him up by 10 but most polls have him up by 2-4 points in national polls. Looks like the "hockey mom" has brought other hockey moms from Michigan and Pennsylvania back in play as well as Obama is up by 1 in Michigan after leading by 5 points earlier. This election will be very close to the end, but the elecotoral college has not shifted as Obama in the RCP Poll of Polls would win by 8 electoral votes. The Bartender's home state of Colorado being the difference at 0.4%.
__________________ Indiancowboy Researched Write-ups Every day.
9-16-08 Will have to admit IC if you placed your bet in Feb. on McCain, you as usual, made a good bet. I sometimes get in trouble when I bet with my heart and soul. But I still think after the debates, most Americans will see who will lead us into the future.(OBAMA)!!!!!!!!!!!!
Scarry stuff indeed. I'm not sure where they got the number of Iraqi civilians (93,000) we have slaughtered, but the number should be over a million. Just Foreign Policy - Iraqi Death Estimate
Before anyone dismisses this as "people die in wars", if the amoung the dead were your children, your mother, your father, your wife, your friends, I'm sure we would feel differently.
And that treasonous bas tard who lives on Pennsylvvania Ave should be hung from a yard arm for the comment "we're still looking for WMD's hahaha". The go ddamn devil. He is directly responsible for the murder of over a million people, and he jokes.
"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws." -John Adams
Is Sarah Palin’s God a Liar and a War Criminal By Ed Ciaccio 16/09/08 "ICH" -- -- In June, 2008, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, now Republican Senator John McCain’s choice for his running mate as vice-president, spoke to a group of ministry students at her Wasilla, Alaska Assembly of God Church. Palin asked these church leaders to pray for soldiers, including her own son, who would soon be deployed to Iraq, in these words: "that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan
Would God’s plan include lying about, and misrepresenting crucial information about, the alleged reasons for going to war against Iraq? Would it include commission of the “supreme international crime” of waging an unprovoked, unnecessary war of aggression against a nation and its people who never threatened the United States? What kind of God would have such a plan?
Or is it that Sarah Palin is so poorly informed that, three years after the first confirmation of George W. Bush’s intention to attack Iraq, whether or not there was any threat from Iraq, was revealed, she is unaware of this revelation? Is she so out of touch with facts that she still believes the long-ago discredited lies told by the Bush administration? Or was she just pandering to neoconservatives who still want to pervert the foreign policy of our country? And why drag God into it
We have known, from the U.K. Sunday Times of May 1, 2005 story “The secret Downing Street memo” (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article387374.ece) which leaked the July 23, 2002 “Downing Street Minutes,” that George W. Bush was “fixing the intelligence” to support his unsupportable assertions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction which threatened Iraq’s neighbors as well as the United States
Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action
Bush, himself, knew these assertions were unsupportable, especially after he received the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October, 1, 2002 which concluded that it was NOT certain that Saddam Hussein still had weapons of mass destruction at all, let alone was threatening to use them. But Bush was so intent about attacking Iraq that he ordered critical sections of this NIE kept from most members of Congress in addition to the press and the American people, as W. Patrick Lang, a retired U.S. Army colonel and Middle East intelligence specialist, wrote in 2004
There was also the subtle hiding of the objections of the Department of Energy and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) in the NIE of October 2002. One congressional source explained that the classified NIE was made available in its entirety to only a select few members of Congress. There were verbal briefings and an elaborate process to access the document in a secure location. But it was never clear that the 27-page unclassified version that was available to every office was missing any crucial information. (“Drinking the Kool-Aid” by W. Patrick Lang http://www.mepc.org/journal_vol11/0406_lang.asp
In addition, on September 17, 2005, in “Powell's Widening Credibility Gap” (http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/091605.html), investigative journalist Robert Parry wrote,:
At the CIA, doubts grew about WMD claims from Iraqi defectors, including one codenamed “Curveball” who had asserted that Iraq had mobile WMD labs, but who was suspected of fabrication.
Tyler Drumheller, former chief of the CIA’s European Division, said his office had issued repeated warnings about Curveball’s accounts. “Everyone in the chain of command knew exactly what was happening,” said Drumheller, who scoffed at claims by Tenet and McLaughlin that they didn’t know about Curveball’s credibility problems. [Los Angeles Times, April 2, 2005
As veteran Los Angeles County prosecuting attorney Vincent Bugliosi makes clear in his recent book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder (May, 2008), Bush received the classified CIA NIE on October 1, 2002, and its conclusion was that there was no solid case for suspecting Saddam Hussein and Iraq of possessing weapons of mass destruction which posed an imminent threat. Yet, six days later, Bush intentionally released an unclassified version of this NIE to the press and public which deleted that significant conclusion, so that he could mislead us to believe there were grounds to fear Saddam Hussein.
Coupled with former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s July, 2003 exposure of the Iraq-Niger “yellowcake” hoax, which resulted in his wife, CIA officer Valerie Plame, being outed in retaliation, thus ending her CIA career as well as, possibly, the lives of many overseas agents in her network, all of the preceding information has been known for at least three years.
Then, in a March 7, 2006 broadcast of “Democracy Now!” (http://www.democracynow.org/2006/3/7/lawless_world_bush_considered_flying_us), host Amy Goodman interviewed British international law professor Philippe Sands, who revealed yet another piece of evidence revealing how Bush was so desperate to attack Iraq that he considered resorting to a type of “false flag” provocation:[/LEFT]
New evidence has emerged that President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed in January 2003 to attack Iraq regardless of whether diplomatic efforts succeeded. The revelation comes in a newly updated version of the book “Lawless World” by British international law professor Philippe Sands. According to the book, Blair offered Bush his full support of the war during a meeting at the White House in January 2003. Sands says his account is based on a summary of the meeting prepared by one of the participants.
]Bush also reportedly said the “diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning”. In addition the book reveals President Bush told Blair that the United States was considering flying U2 spy planes disguised as United Nations planes over Iraq in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein. If Iraq fired on the planes, it would help justify a U.S.-led invasion.
As Sands asked, “Why would the British prime minister and the American president be talking about the possibility of provoking a material breach if they had clear and compelling evidence?”
So, years before Sarah Palin told ministry students in her Alaska church congregation that our war on, and occupation of, Iraq was “a task that is from God,” George W. Bush was lying and misrepresenting information about the need to attack Iraq.
Therefore the war on Iraq was illegal, as then United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated in a BBC interview on September 16, 2004 (see “Iraq war illegal, says Annan” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3661134.stm). It was an unprovoked, unnecessary war of aggression against a sovereign nation which did not threaten the United States. As such, it is the “supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole,"according to Justice Robert H. Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, immediately following World War II
Sowe know that Bush, Cheney, and all the other architects of the Iraq War are war criminals and that this “supreme international crime” was definitely their task. But how does that make it God’s task? If it is, then God must surely be not only a serial liar, but a war criminal as well.
But I doubt any Christian, or any believer in God, for that matter, would claim that the supreme international war crime of waging aggressive war, especially one based on lies, was “a task that is from God.” So is Sarah Palin deluded, ignorant, or just pandering to the worst, most extreme elements in our country?
Finally, on Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008, speaking before soldiers in Alaska, including her own son, who were about to be deployed to Iraq, Gov. Palin actually told them they were being sent there to, "defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans" (see “Palin Links Iraq to Sept. 11 In Talk to Troops in Alaska” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/11/AR2008091103789_pf.html).
But, on September 18, 2003, Bush himself had said there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the September 11, 2001 attacks (see "Bush rejects Saddam 9/11 link" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3118262.stm).
And on June 17, 2004, the Washington Post had reported that "The Sept. 11 commission reported yesterday that it has found no ‘collaborative relationship’ between Iraq and al Qaeda, challenging one of the Bush administration's main justifications for the war in Iraq." (see "Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47812-2004Jun16.html).
So where has Sarah Palin been during all these revelations which clearly debunk Bush’s reasons for attacking and occupying Iraq? Aside from being deeply offending believers by claiming the Bush lies and supreme international war crime were “a task from God,” these claims made by Palin in June, 2008 and then in September, 2008 prove how completely unqualified she is to be considered as a vice-presidential candidate when she clearly knows nothing of the truth about the most important historical events of our time.
Worse still, if she does, indeed, know these vitally important basic facts which are a prerequisite for national office, but is continuing to perpetuate the Bush lies and justifying his war crime by calling it all “a task from God,” who would want someone of that despicable character to be only a heartbeat away from the U.S. presidency, especially given John McCain’s advanced age and history of multiple occurrences of potentially fatal skin cancer?
Much worse than her repeated lies about opposing “the bridge to nowhere” and always fighting against earmarks and not firing her Commissioner for failing to fire her ex-brother-in-law, and visiting Iraq, these inaccuracies or, perhaps, lies, about the Iraq war and her attempts to cloak them in religious justifications reveal a desperately ambitious person whose extreme ideas present a danger to our republic.
Great write Vytas12. I might add: But just think if SHE does get elected(McCAIN has been riding in the back seat) we will be a heart beat away from talking to "GOD" himself thru PALIN. These assembly of god people do believe the "holy ghost" enters them and makes them speak in tongues.THIS SCARES THE HELL OUT OF ME !!!!! When will the human race ever see this garbage had its day. IF YOUR NOT PART OF THE FUTURE, THEN GET OUT OF THE WAY !!!!!!! McCain,same old crows believing in the same old thang. OBAMA,change for the better of man!!!!!!!!!! Still think I made a good bet.BET THE HOUSE !!!!!!!!!
Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this": Lt Gen William Boykin, speaking of G. W. Bush, New York Times, 17 October 2003
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"God gave the savior to the German people. We have faith, deep and unshakeable faith, that he was sent to us by God to save Germany." Hermann Goering, speaking of Hitler
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"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side": Aristotle
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"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier - just so long as I'm the dictator". George W. Bush, 18 December 2000
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"International law? I better call my lawyer; he didn't bring that up to me" George W. Bush, 12 December 2003
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