LIFE IS TOUGH IN TEXAS WHEN YOU HAVE TO DEAL WITH FOLKS WHO HAVE CLEARLY DEPARTED FROM REALITY INTO A TWILIGHT ZONE OF MENDACITY AND DISTORTION, NOT TO MENTION CENSORSHIP AND PROPAGANDA.
Hurricanes don't happen in South Texas, there are no earthquakes in California and Dr. Hansen of NASA, the global warming specialist's findings, have been censored by the Bush Administration. All science policy is reviewed by a Bush appointed conservative lawyer who has no background in science. Scientific findings are fixed around neocon policy, just like the intelligence on Iraq was cherry picked. Check out the archives on 60 Minutes for 7/30/06.
FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES VIA TRUTHOUT.ORG
"FOOLING THE VOTERS"
Excerpts:
One of the bills was a pension reform measure. The other was a grab bag that contains three main items: an extension of the expired tax credit for corporate research; a $2.10 an hour increase in the minimum wage, to be phased in over three years; and a multibillion-dollar estate-tax cut. That's the deal House Republicans are really offering - a few more dollars for 6.6 million working Americans; billions more for some 8,000 of the wealthiest families.
It is cynical in the extreme. Extending the research tax credit is noncontroversial, yet pressing. A minimum wage increase is compelling - morally, politically and financially - but Republicans generally oppose it. And the estate-tax cut has already failed to pass the Senate twice this summer. So House Republicans linked it to the research credit and the minimum wage, hoping to flip a handful of senators from both parties who have voted against estate-tax cuts in the past. Democrats who vote against the estate tax, Republicans think, can be painted as voting against a higher minimum wage.
This is an attempt at extortion. There is no way to justify providing yet another enormous tax shelter to the nation's wealthiest heirs in the face of huge budget deficits, growing income inequality and looming government obligations for Social Security and Medicare.
As for the House's pension bill, it is not the overhaul that Congress has long been promising. The promised bill would have meshed House and Senate versions of pension reform into a single bill that would have almost certainly passed each chamber. But the conference was fatally derailed last Thursday when House Republican negotiators, including the majority leader, John Boehner, refused to attend a meeting called by Senate Republicans to settle a few remaining differences. Mr. Boehner and his followers avoided having to vote - and lose - on items that other negotiators wanted in the final bill.
"FOOLING THE VOTERS"
MR. LOU DOBBS OF CNN ASKS WHY BUSH IS IGNORING OUR LAWS
Mr. Dobbs is a moderate Republican, by the way. We are supposed to be a nation of laws not men. Not under W.
From CNN.com via Truthout.org.
WHY IS BUSH IGNORING OUR LAWS
BUSH POLICY A DISASTER IN THE MIDDLE EAST, ACCORDING TO GOP FORMER POLICY PLANNING DIRECTOR FOR THE STATE DEPT.
From the Washington Post.com
Excerpts:
"The arrows are all pointing in the wrong direction," said Richard N. Haass, who was President Bush's first-term State Department policy planning director. "The biggest danger in the short run is it just increases frustration and alienation from the United States in the Arab world. Not just the Arab world, but in Europe and around the world. People will get a daily drumbeat of suffering in Lebanon and this will just drive up anti-Americanism to new heights."
The White House recognizes the danger but thinks the missiles flying both ways across the Israel-Lebanon border carry with them a chance to finally break out of the stalemate of Middle East geopolitics. Bush and his advisers hope the conflict can destroy or at least cripple Hezbollah and in the process strike a blow against the militia's sponsor, Iran, while forcing the region to move toward final settlement of the decades-old conflict with Israel.
CRISIS IN MIDDLE EAST COULD UNDERCUT BUSH'S LONG TERM GOALS
THE STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE OF NEWS ON IRAQ
Powerful argument made by Mr. Frank Rich of The New York Times yesterday. The link below is from The Progressive American.
Excerpts:
The steady falloff in Iraq coverage isn't happenstance. It's a barometer of the scope of the tragedy. For reporters, the already apocalyptic security situation in Baghdad keeps getting worse, simply making the war more difficult to cover than ever. The audience has its own phobia: Iraq is a bummer. "It is depressing to pay attention to this war on terror," said Fox News's Bill O'Reilly on July 18. "I mean, it's summertime." Americans don't like to lose, whatever the season. They know defeat when they see it, no matter how many new plans for victory are trotted out to obscure that reality.
The specter of defeat is not the only reason Americans have switched off Iraq. The larger issue is that we don't know what we — or, more specifically, 135,000 brave and vulnerable American troops — are fighting for. In contrast to the Israel-Hezbollah war, where the stakes for the combatants and American interests are clear, the war in Iraq has no rationale to keep it afloat on television or anywhere else. It's a big, nightmarish story, all right, but one that lacks the thread of a coherent plot.
Certainly there has been no shortage of retrofitted explanations for the war in the three-plus years since the administration's initial casus belli, to fend off Saddam's mushroom clouds and vanquish Al Qaeda, proved to be frauds. We've been told that the war would promote democracy in the Arab world. And make the region safer for Israel. And secure the flow of cheap oil. If any of these justifications retained any credibility, they have been obliterated by Crisis in the Middle East. The new war is a grueling daily object lesson in just how much the American blunders in Iraq have undermined the one robust democracy that already existed in the region, Israel, while emboldening terrorists and strengthening the hand of Iran.
But it's the collapse of the one remaining (and unassailable) motivation that still might justify staying the course in Iraq — as a humanitarian mission on behalf of the Iraqi people — that is most revealing of what a moral catastrophe this misadventure has been for our country. The sad truth is that the war's architects always cared more about their own grandiose political and ideological ambitions than they did about the Iraqis, and they communicated that indifference from the start to Iraqis and Americans alike. The legacy of that attitude is that the American public cannot be rallied to the Iraqi cause today, as the war reaches its treacherous endgame.
The Bush administration constantly congratulates itself for liberating Iraq from Saddam's genocidal regime. But regime change was never billed as a primary motivation for the war; the White House instead appealed to American fears and narcissism — we had to be saved from Saddam's W.M.D. From "Shock and Awe" on, the fate of Iraqis was an afterthought. They would greet our troops with flowers and go about their business.
Donald Rumsfeld boasted that "the care" and "the humanity" that went into our precision assaults on military targets would minimize any civilian deaths. Such casualties were merely "collateral damage," unworthy of quantification. "We don't do body counts," said Gen. Tommy Franks. President Bush at last started counting those Iraqi bodies publicly — with an estimate of 30,000 — some seven months ago. (More recently, The Los Angeles Times put the figure at, conservatively, 50,000.) By then, Americans had tuned out.
The contempt our government showed for Iraqis was not just to be found in our cavalier stance toward their casualties, or in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. There was a cultural condescension toward the Iraqi people from the get-go as well, as if they were schoolchildren in a compassionate-conservatism campaign ad. This attitude was epitomized by Mr. Rumsfeld's "stuff happens" response to the looting of Baghdad at the dawn of the American occupation. In "Fiasco," his stunning new book about the American failure in Iraq, Thomas E. Ricks, The Washington Post's senior Pentagon correspondent, captures the meaning of that pivotal moment perfectly: "The message sent to Iraqis was far more troubling than Americans understood. It was that the U.S. government didn't care — or, even more troubling for the future security of Iraq, that it did care but was incapable of acting effectively."
WHY THE MSM IS NOT REPORTING ON IRAQ
A GLIMPSE INTO THE GRASSROOTS EFFORTS IN TEXAS TO BEAT BACK THE LIES, THE PROPAGANDA AND THE DISTORTED REALITIES. See how down and dirty the GOP gets when you tell them the truth and inform them of facts. Check out Rove's hand book in real time play, i.e. keep on telling the lies and eventually the lies will become perceived as truth. This is where the GOP has stooped since Bush W. stole the office of the Presidency.
GRASSROOTS DEMS TAKE ON NEONUTS IN BUSH LAND
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