Big-time lobbyist Rick Berman creates nonprofit front groups to push corporate interests. Now he’s in an anti-union ad pretending to be an auto mechanic.
This is how brazen the corporatocracy is getting. They’re buying elections and they don’t care if we know it because we can’t do anything about it. They have the money and we don’t. Period. We’re on the outside looking in. Welcome to Campaign 2012!
(With special thanks to the activist Republican judges on the Supreme Court who brought us Citizens United.)
Remember George W? Remember those eight years during which the righties told us it verged on treason to show anything but undying reverence and respect for the office of the president?
The good folks over at Mother Jones have put together a timeline of the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq — from August, 1992 through March, 2003.
I found it rather upsetting to be reminded of the lies and deceit but it is interesting nonetheless. How we got there and the web our Dear Leaders wove in order to convince us an invasion was necessary is something we should never forget, lest it happen again.
For example, this is the second to last entry, dated March 18, 2003:
Washington Post article headlined “Bush Clings to Dubious Allegations About Iraq” notes, “As the Bush administration prepares to attack Iraq this week, it is doing so on the basis of a number of allegations against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that have been challenged—and in some cases disproved—by the United Nations, European governments and even U.S. intelligence reports.” Story is buried on Page A13.
Oh, and P.S. — Al Jazeera has a post up (video) titled: US Post-Iraq Legacy: The War is Finally Declared Over After Nine Years , but What are the Experiences and Lessons Learned by US Soldiers. I haven’t watched it yet but here’s a link, FYI.
This is a horrific story and it occurred under George W. Bush’s watch. You know, when the American flag was ubiquitous and politicians were criticized for not wearing a flag pin on their lapel. When we were continuously reminded how much conservatives respected the troops (as opposed to liberals who allegedly didn’t).
Yeah, that’s right. That’s when this sickening thing happened:
“The Air Force dumped the incinerated partial remains of at least 274 American troops in a Virginia landfill, far more than the military had acknowledged, before halting the secretive practice three years ago, records show.
“The landfill dumping was concealed from families who had authorized the military to dispose of the remains in a dignified and respectful manner, Air Force officials said. There are no plans, they said, to alert those families now.
[...]
The landfill disposals were never formally authorized under military policies or regulations. They also were not disclosed to senior Pentagon officials who conducted a high-level review of cremation policies at the Dover mortuary in 2008, records show.
[...]
“This week, after The Post pressed for information contained in the Dover mortuary’s electronic database, the Air Force produced a tally based on those records. It showed that 976 fragments from 274 military personnel were cremated, incinerated and taken to the landfill between 2004 and 2008.”
This includes, Autographed Hardcover Editions of the Following:
Decision Points by President George W. Bush
In My Time by Vice President Dick Cheney
Known & Unknown by Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
No Higher Honor by Secretary Condoleezza Rice
Courage & Consequence by Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove
Also includes:
Certificate of Authenticity for each book
Leather Collector’s Box Numbered out of 250
Geezus, I lived through “The Bush Years.” That was bad enough. The last thing I need or want is a gift set screaming at me from the bookshelf, reminding me how nightmarish those eight years were.
So America, after hundreds of billions of dollars and roughly 100,000 lives lost, this is Baghdad today (thanks George!):
Vienna’s excellent infrastructure, safe streets and good public health service make it the nicest place to live in the world, consulting group Mercer said in a global survey which put Baghdad firmly in last place.
German and Swiss cities also performed especially well in the quality of living rankings, with Zurich, Munich, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Geneva and Bern in the top 10.
The Austrian capital, with its ornate buildings, public parks and extensive bicycle network recently reduced the cost of its annual public transport ticket to 1 euro a day.
Serious crime is rare and the city of around 1.7 million inhabitants regularly tops global quality of life surveys.
[...]
Baghdad’s political turmoil, poor security enforcement and attacks on local people and foreigners made it the worst place to live in 2011, both in terms of life quality and safety.
Photo: Khalid Mohammed / AP
America, I’m ashamed of us.
If you’d like to see the full list of most livable cities based on (1) quality of life, and (2) personal safety, go here. The highest ranked U.S. city in the quality of life category is Honolulu at #29. There are no U.S. cities in the personal safety category.
Oh, and P.S.: Jeremy Scahill, you’re my badass hero of the month. Maybe of the year.
Thank you for saying exactly what I hope I would say if I ran into that war criminal (he’s the personification of a coward).
My jaw dropped last week when I saw the liberal media CNN legitimize Wolfowitz by allowing him to ask a question at their Republican/Heritage Foundation/American Enterprise Institute debate.
It was a sad, tragic moment but moving on, bravo to you!
I haven’t watched any “liberal media” today but I’m sure this is the top story and that it’s being repeated every ten or 15 minutes:
A tribunal in Malaysia, spearheaded by that nation’s former Prime Minister, yesterday found George Bush and Tony Blair guilty of “crimes against peace” and other war crimes for their 2003 aggressive attack on Iraq, as well as fabricating pretexts used to justify the attack. The seven-member Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal — which featured an American law professor as one of its chief prosecutors — has no formal enforcement power, but was modeled after a 1967 tribunal in Sweden and Denmark that found the U.S. guilty of a war of aggression in Vietnam, and, even more so, after the U.S.-led Nuremberg Tribunal held after World War II. Just as the U.S. steadfastly ignored the 1967 tribunal on Vietnam, Bush and Blair both ignored the summons sent to them and thus were tried in absentia.
The tribunal ruled that Bush and Blair’s name should be entered in a register of war criminals, urged that they be recognized as such under the Rome Statute, and will also petition the International Criminal Court to proceed with binding charges.
Scott Olsen, the 24-year-old Iraq war veteran who was rushed to the hospital on October 25 after being hit by an Oakland Police Department “projectile” at the Occupy Oakland encampment and who suffered a fractured skull and had trouble speaking, has issued his first statement since that incident:
I’m feeling a lot better, with a long road in front of me. After my freedom of speech was quite literally taken from me, my speech is coming back but I’ve got a lot of work to do with rehab. Thank you for all your support, it has meant the world to me. You’ll be hearing more from me in the near future and soon enough we’ll see you in our streets!
Bearing in mind that Olsen “fought for our freedoms” in Iraq (thanks George), this part of the statement almost brings tears to my eyes: “After my freedom of speech was quite literally taken from me…”
Hey folks, this is “old news” (February 5, 2011) but being the political junky that I am, I had not heard about it until today so I’m thinkin’ maybe you haven’t heard about it either:
President George W. Bush has canceled an event in the famously neutral country Switzerland because of expected protests to his presence there.
Bush was supposed to give the keynote address at a Jewish group’s charity gala on Feb. 12 in Geneva.
Leftist groups had planned to protest the visit, according to news agencies. But several human rights groups had also filed criminal complaints against Bush, demanding that he be taken into custody if he stepped on Swiss soil and investigated for allegations of ordering torture.
A right-wing member of the Swiss parliament also demanded last week Bush’s arrest on war crimes allegations if he came to the country, according to Reuters.
This was mentioned on DemocracyNow! today in connection with this:
Amnesty International says the Canadian government must arrest former U.S. president George W. Bush when he visits the country next week.
The human rights group says Canada is obliged under both Canadian and international law to arrest Bush and investigate him for war crimes and authorizing torture in the U.S.-led war on terror, the Canadian Press reports.
Bush is scheduled to attend an economic conference in Surrey, British Columbia, on October 20, along with former president Bill Clinton.
Here’s a great article about Republicans think it’s cool to be stupid. An excerpt:
For eight years, just about every time George W. Bush was in the same room as someone with a post-graduate degree, the failed former president would tell the same joke: “I remind people that, like when I’m with Condi I say, she’s the Ph.D. and I’m the C-student, and just look at who’s the president and who’s the advisor.”
Republican crowds always cheered the line, reinforcing the anti-intellectual attitudes that too often dominate conservative thought. The man who succeeded Bush in Austin, and hopes to succeed Bush as the next Republican president, is cut from the same cloth.
As a child, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas was dead set on being a veterinarian. “That was my heart’s content. It’s what I always wanted to do,” he said.
Then came a day of reckoning, during the second semester of his sophomore year at Texas A&M University, when he went to see the dean of the veterinary school. His advice: switch to an easier major.
“He said, `Son, I’m looking at your transcript,’” Mr. Perry said. “‘You want to be an animal science major.’”
Perry made the joke during a speech yesterday at Liberty University, a school founded by crazed televangelist Jerry Falwell. The Texas governor didn’t say much about politics, but he spent a fair amount of time talking about what a lousy student he was.
Perry noted, for example, that at his small high school, “I graduated in the top 10 of my graduating class — of 13.” The crowd laughed and applauded.
ennifer Rubin, a conservative writer at the Washington Post, said Perry’s speech “was, at least in part, a celebration of ignorance.” She added, “Yes, he was trying to be self-deprecating, but it’s disturbing to see that he thinks being a rotten student and a know-nothing gives one street cred in the GOP.”
Disturbing to say the least. Hey, let’s encourage our kids to be as crappy a student; as ignorant as they can be! Go Amerrrrca!
I always love reading Chris Hedges and this essay — A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe — is no exception. It captures what I was thinking and feeling yesterday.
What was played out in the weeks after the attacks was the old, familiar battle between force and human imagination, between the crude instruments of violence and the capacity for empathy and understanding. Human imagination lost. Coldblooded reason, which does not speak the language of the imagination, won. We began to speak and think in the empty, mindless nationalist clichés about terror that the state handed to us. We became what we abhorred. The deaths were used to justify pre-emptive war, invasion, Shock and Awe, prolonged occupation, targeted assassinations, torture, offshore penal colonies, gunning down families at checkpoints, massive aerial bombardments, drone attacks, missile strikes and the killing of dozens and soon hundreds and then thousands and later tens of thousands and finally hundreds of thousands of innocent people. We produced piles of corpses in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and extended the reach of our killing machine to Yemen and Somalia. And by beatifying our dead, by cementing into the national psyche fear and the imperative of permanent war, and by stoking our collective humiliation, the state carried out crimes, atrocities and killings that dwarfed anything carried out against us on 9/11. The best that force can do is impose order. It can never elicit harmony. And force was justified, and is still justified, by the first dead. Ten years later these dead haunt us like Banquo’s ghost.
[...]
We have still not woken up to whom we have become, to the fatal erosion of domestic and international law and the senseless waste of lives, resources and trillions of dollars to wage wars that ultimately we can never win. We do not see that our own faces have become as contorted as the faces of the demented hijackers who seized the three commercial jetliners a decade ago. We do not grasp that Osama bin Laden’s twisted vision of a world of indiscriminate violence and terror has triumphed. The attacks turned us into monsters, grotesque ghouls, sadists and killers who drop bombs on village children and waterboard those we kidnap, strip of their rights and hold for years without due process. We acted before we were able to think. And it is the satanic lust of violence that has us locked in its grip.
[...]
We could have gone another route. We could have built on the profound sympathy and empathy that swept through the world following the attacks. The revulsion over the crimes that took place 10 years ago, including in the Muslim world, where I was working in the weeks and months after 9/11, was nearly universal. The attacks, if we had turned them over to intelligence agencies and diplomats, might have opened possibilities not of war and death but ultimately reconciliation and communication, of redressing the wrongs that we commit in the Middle East and that are committed by Israel with our blessing. It was a moment we squandered. Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement. We became the radical Islamist movement’s most effective recruiting tool. We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists too. The sad legacy of 9/11 is that the assholes, on each side, won.
My heart goes out to all of those who lost their lives on 9/11/01. I also feel deep sorrow for the death of thousands of innocent Iraqis — Iraq having had nothing to do with 9/11 — and the 4,400+ American soldiers who gave their lives “defending our freedom” there.
It is a tragedy that the likes of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — people who are being revered today — lead us into that war, a war that should have never happened; that should have ended years ago; a war that is still sucking the life blood out of our country economically
In retrospect, on this 10th anniversary, there is much more than 9/11 itself to mourn.
President’s Daily Brief prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency and given to the U.S. President George W. Bush on August 6, 2001. The brief warned of terrorism threats from Osama bin Laden and al-Quaeda 36 days before the September 11, 2001.
9/11 happened in part because the government we had was on vacation in Crawford, Texas.
I am so proud of my town. I don’t care if I have to crawl on my hands and knees to get to the polling place this November because I can’t wait to vote against the fascist notion that corporations are people and money is speech:
Boulder voters will get to voice their opinion this fall on whether the U.S. Constitution should be amended to make it clear that corporations are not people and that money is not speech.
Talk about judicial activism. There has never been such a blatant act of judicial activism as the corporate personhood ruling handed down by the corporatist Republicans who sit on our present day Supreme Court. (Thanks W.)
Here is a collage of Republicans defending raising the debt ceiling in 2002 and 2004 (h/t Think Progress). This is the same crowd that railed against raising it over the last couple weeks.
That was a pitiful speech you gave last night Obama. I mean, we’ve heard it all before: “Bipartisan.” “I’m confident.” “Our friends across the aisle.”
Next time, just stand there and point to this graph:
We have to raise the debt ceiling to pay for Bush’s spending; for things we’ve already committed to; things we’ve already put on the credit card. Say that.
Talk about the mother of all attempts to re-write history, check out what Fox’s Eric Bohling said yesterday:
Fox News host Eric Bolling pulled a Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday, asserting that there were no terrorist attacks on “American soil” during President Bush’s term in office.
Giuliani famously made a similar assertion in early 2010, saying, “we had no domestic attacks under Bush.” Of course, the 9/11 attacks happened under Bush.
[...]
Panelist Bob Beckel said that the former president had used fear-mongering around the non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. As he attempted to continue his point, Bolling cut him off and started to move on to the next segment.
America was certainly safe between 2000 and 2008,” he said. “I don’t remember any attacks on American soil during that period of time.” Nobody on the panel challenged this comment.
The outrageous thing about this is not only what Bolling said, but that NOBODY ON THE PANEL CHALLENGED IT!
Fox bills panelist Bob Beckel as one of their “liberals.” Yeah, right. He’s such a flaming liberal that he sat there and said nothing instead of freakin’ jumping up out of his chair with flames coming out of his ears. Yep, Beckel is exactly the kind of pansy, suck-ass, wimp-shit “liberal” they love on Fox.
You’ve probably heard about the Tea Party obsession with florescent light bulbs. They claim a new law that goes into effect next year banning the old bulbs and paving the way for the use of more florescents, was, according to Michele Bachmann, an example of reach by President Obama: “we bought a bureaucracy that now tells us which light bulbs to buy.”
Despite the frenzy,
House Republicans on Tuesday failed to stop the enactment of new energy-saving standards for light bulbs they portrayed as yet another example of big government interfering in people’s lives.
The GOP bill to overturn the standards set to go into effect next year fell short of the two-thirds majority needed for passage. The vote was 233-193.
And here’s a hugely relevant fact that the screamers on the right would rather their flock not know:
The standards have not been particularly contentious before now. They were crafted in 2007 with Republican participation and signed into law by President George W. Bush. People seem to like the new choices and the energy savings they bring, polling finds.
Former vice president Dick Cheney is trying to avoid a sixth heart attack – with the help of a battery-operated turbine.
Powered by battery packs strapped to Cheney’s chest, the ‘Left Ventricular Assist Device’, a turbine implanted near his heart’s major chamber, pumps blood into his aorta and circulates it throughout his body.
Fitted a year ago after his fifth heart attack, its rotor spins between 8,000 and 10,000 times a minute, lifting the strain on his weakened organ.
In a rare outpouring Cheney hailed advances in American medical science.
‘I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to live in a place and a time when all that was going on,’ he todl [sic] the Wall Street Journal.
George W. Bush gave the “job creators” a tax cut because he said they’d create jobs if he did.
U.S. stocks posted broad losses on Friday as Wall Street dealt with a dismal June jobs report that showed hiring crawled to a near standstill last month.
[...]
June’s unemployment rate rose to 9.2% from 9.1%, versus the decline to 9% economists had expected.
OK. So. The Republicans have convinced us (with lots of help from the “liberal media”) that raising the debt ceiling will mean the end of the world, right?
All you need to know as to what a crock of shit that is is (1) they voted to raise the debt ceiling seven times under George W. Bush:
(2) Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt, (3) George W. Bush doubled the national debt and (4) a $3 trillion tab for Bush’s unfunded wars still remains (and it’s climbing, unfortunately).
Thanks to Crooks and Liars for assembling all this info (there’s more here) but really, do we need a gargantuan post to make the point that in reality Republicans don’t give a damn about raising the debt ceiling ah, except that is, when their guy isn’t the one doing it?
If we had a real “news” media around here, we’d all know this stuff.
