JOHN MCCAIN: "Now we’ve got the cables. We’ve got talk radio. We’ve got the bloggers. I hate the bloggers. We’ve got all kinds of sources of information."
... If George Bush was qualified for any post, it would be a shop teacher -- known as "Seven-fingers" Bush ...
22 people attended an Obama house party June 28th on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest that has just 5 year-around residents. At least half a dozen republicans were among the attendees. Jack officiated starting the proceedings with a rundown of some of the Bush administration's blunders. There followed some spirited debate with almost unanimous agreement that the past 7 years of the Bush administration have been disastrous.
The house party was followed by an Obama beach party in a location of incomparable beauty, underscoring the importance of getting back on track protecting the environment.
The song is "One of These Days" by Emmylou Harris.
No sooner had Bush started speaking at the naturalization ceremony welcoming new American citizens than protesters began shouting at him, calling him a “war criminal.” The President paused in his remarks and then responded, “To my fellow citizens, we believe in free speech in the United States of America.” One woman moved towards the stage before being stopped by security, but other protesters still made their voices heard. Only minutes later, another protester shouted expletives at the President, while still another called Bush “a fascist”. By the time Bush finished his 10-minute remarks, at least nine protesters had been escorted out of the event by law enforcement. Protesters also lined the President’s motorcade route, chanting “Arrest Bush” as he drove to and from the Monticello ceremony.
Coughing and spluttering resonated around Tweede Kamer coffeeshop in Amsterdam yesterday as customers got to grips with new Dutch smoking regulations that prohibit tobacco but not marijuana.
“They're having to smoke pure weed now and they're not used to it,” Frank, working behind the counter, said. “That's why there's all this coughing. It's going to be quite tricky.”
The Netherlands' unique approach to smoking was much in evidence yesterday as it became the latest European country after the likes of Britain and France to introduce a ban on lighting-up in public places.
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Bush administration officials knew that a Texas oil company with close ties to President Bush was planning to sign an oil deal with the regional Kurdistan government that ran counter to American policy and undercut Iraq’s central government, a Congressional committee has concluded.
The company, Hunt Oil of Dallas, signed the deal with Kurdistan’s semiautonomous government last September. Its chief executive, Ray L. Hunt, a close political ally of President Bush, briefed an advisory board to Mr. Bush on his contacts with Kurdish officials before the deal was signed.
In an e-mail message released by the Congressional committee, a State Department official in Washington, briefed by a colleague about the impending deal with the Kurdistan Regional Government, wrote: “Many thanks for the heads up; getting an American company to sign a deal with the K.R.G. will make big news back here. Please keep us posted.”
The release of the documents comes as the administration is defending help that United States officials provided in drawing up a separate set of no-bid contracts, still pending, between Iraq’s Oil Ministry in Baghdad and five major Western oil companies to provide services at other Iraqi oil fields.
Disclosure of those contracts has provided substantial fuel to critics of the Iraq war, both in the United States and abroad, who contend that the enormous Iraqi oil reserves were a motivation for the American-led invasion — an assertion the administration has repeatedly denied.
The documents released by Mr. Waxman also lay bare what has become a serious dispute between the company and the State Department over what was said between them before the deal last year.
For example, a senior Hunt official said he was told by State Department officials during a meeting on June 15, 2007, that the United States government did not object to deals with the Kurdish regional government.
There are some politicians whom advisers should never permit to run their own campaigns, and John McCain is one of them. Watching him, I get the sense, at times, that he still sees himself as the macho, hotshot naval cadet whose picaresque adventures install him as the truest man among men, which voters are bound to see, acknowledge and swoon over.
There has always been, and so it remains, only one slim way in which McCain can control his destiny and thereby win this thing: to blast away at Obama with unremitting assaults on his character, his inexperience and his "liberalism" (in anticipation of which, of course, the Obama campaign has already launched a concerted flanking maneuver to the center-right).
But above all, the McCain campaign must blast -- blast anything and everything, go as negative as the almost limitless boundaries of poor taste can take it.
Yet, there may be a problem with this Rove-Schmidtian strategy.
Buried, I sense as well, in McCain's macho-cadet code of manliness is the nagging political anachronism of personal honor: that is, a few hijinks are OK, but a sustained campaign of outright dishonesty -- the very species of fraudulence deployed against him by Bush in 2000 -- is for McCain, perhaps, beyond the pale.
Because, I further sense, even deeper in McCain's psyche is the emotional undercurrent of recognition that he has already lost. So why not go down with a little honor intact?
Just look at McCain; watch him, on the stump, and you see a man almost clinically depressed and already defeated. His performance is so unstintingly morbid, it's as though he just wants to get the inevitable over with.
And if I'm correct, Steve Schmidt is about to encounter a lot of internal flak, guaranteeing yet more campaign confusion, if not more rearrangement of the deck chairs.
Drinky McStaggers' economic stimulus rebate checks have really firmed up consumer spending in hard times with real hot, sweaty, body thumping stimulus... websites focused on adult or erotic material have experienced an upswing in sales in the recent weeks since checks have appeared in millions of Americans’ mailboxes across the country.
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10: Bush Gets Re-elected
9: Alberto Gonzales' Congressional Testimony
8: North Korea Conducts a Nuclear Test
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Supporters of Mr. McCain insist that his military service should be exempt from discussion, except when they feel like bringing it up to prove some point about national security, terrorism or the presidency that it really doesn’t prove at all. But of course he was not the only soldier, sailor or airman to survive such experiences with courage and nobility. There was once another former POW whose candidacy for high office vindicates the Clark argument.
Or has everyone forgotten Admiral Stockdale?
The Iraqi government sued dozens of companies, including oil giant Chevron Corp., for more than $10 billion on Monday, saying they paid kickbacks to former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's government under the U.N. oil-for-food program.
The civil lawsuit, filed in U.S. federal court in Manhattan, seeks to recover damages from companies investigated by a U.N.-commissioned inquiry, claiming they cheated the Iraqi people out of benefits of the $67 billion U.N. program.
The lawsuit says billions of dollars were lost, "all of which were directly translatable into food, medicine and other humanitarian goods that were supposed to reach the Iraqi people."
The lawsuit said the defendants had violated U.S. racketeering laws including mail and wire fraud and money laundering. Chevron and Swiss oil trading firm Vitol were also accused of breaching their fiduciary duties.
Other companies named in the lawsuit include European bank BNP Paribas, drug makers GlaxoSmithKline and Roche Holding, and units of drug company Schering-Plough, as well as several units of Switzerland's engineering company ABB Group.
The lawsuit also names AWB Ltd -- Australia's largest wheat exporter. A 2006 Australian government judicial inquiry found the company paid $222 million in kickbacks to Saddam's regime for wheat sales.
Cimavas EGF, based on two proteins, triggers an immune response from the victim's body and has absolutely no side effects, as most anti-cancer therapy does. The vaccine only attacks cancer cells. The vaccine is meant to serve as a compliment to rather than a replacement for conventional methods such as chemotherapy and radiation. The vaccine also improves patients' breathing and decreases their pain. Posted Jul 1, 2008 08:42 AM PST Category: CUBA Unfortunately, courtesy of the US prohibition against Americans traveling to Cuba, sick Americans who might benefit from having access to this vaccine won't be able to, unless they have the money to travel to South America for treatment.
tags: health, gop denies treatments
And why can we not get access to that here?
The margin of profit is too small if they cure you.
Jonah Goldberg continues to demonstrate how the right-wing is manipulating public discourse in order to confuse and conflate patriotism with rabid nationalism. Make no mistake, this is a coordinated effort to deliberately replace substance with its symbol, meaning with an emblem, and essentially strip language down to nothing but trinkets.
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For a people to be controlled, they must first be robbed of honest discourse and open debate. Distorting language and stripping it of real and honest meaning is the first tool and the best mechanism for transforming a democracy into an authoritarian state. An informed populace is a dangerous populace.
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Patriotism is the word that authoritarians most like to distort and Goldberg demonstrates - once again - just how this distortion is created.
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"What's wrong with John McCain is symptomatic of what's wrong with the Republican Party in these first years of the 21st century," Barr said on "Fox News Sunday." "They talk one thing but do something different, and that's become very obvious to the American people."
Bob Schieffer: General-could I just interrupt you-I have to say, Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences either nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down.
General Wesley Clark: I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president...
-- Face the Nation (CBS), 6/29/08
After a careful reading of Article II of the U.S. Constitution, it appears General Wesley Clark is correct. "Riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down" is neither a qualification nor a requirement nor a recommended prerequisite to being president.
Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn't a war about oil. That's cynical and simplistic, they said. It's about terror and al-Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be ... the bottom line. It is about oil.
Shades of Daniel Plainview, the monstrous petroleum tycoon in the movie, "There Will Be Blood." Half-mad, he exclaims, "There's a whole ocean of oil under our feet!" then adds, "No one can get at it except for me!"
No wonder American troops only guarded the Ministries of Oil and the Interior in Baghdad, even as looters pillaged museums of their priceless antiquities. They were making sure no one could get at the oil except ... guess who?
There you have it. After a long exile, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP are back in Iraq. And on the wings of no-bid contracts - that's right, sweetheart deals like those given Halliburton, KBR and Blackwater. The kind of deals you get only if you have friends in high places. And these war profiteers have friends in very high places.
Perhaps those sweetheart deals in Iraq should be added to his proposed indictments. They have been purchased at a very high price. Four thousand American soldiers dead, tens of thousands permanently wounded, hundreds of thousands of dead and crippled Iraqis plus five million displaced, and a cost that will mount into trillions of dollars. The political analyst Kevin Phillips says America has become little more than an "energy protection force," doing anything to gain access to expensive fuel without regard to the lives of others or the earth itself. One thinks again of Daniel Plainview in "There Will Be Blood." His lust for oil came at the price of his son and his soul.
[...] Perhaps, if you are a conspiracy theorist, it wasn't to secure access to more oil, but rather to take the Iraqi reserves off the market so that oil might go to $100+/barrel making much more profit to the companies, at less corporate expense, than actually extracting the stuff." [...]
A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American officials say.
The disclosure, coming on the eve of the contracts’ announcement, is the first confirmation of direct involvement by the Bush administration in deals to open Iraq’s oil to commercial development and is likely to stoke criticism.
In their role as advisers to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, American government lawyers and private-sector consultants provided template contracts and detailed suggestions on drafting the contracts, advisers and a senior State Department official said. [my em]
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Unlike Hillary Clinton’s rumination about the Bobby Kennedy assassination or Barack Obama’s soliloquy about voters clinging to guns and faith, Mr. Black’s remarks were not an improvisational mishap. He gave his quotes on the record to Fortune magazine. He did so without thinking twice because he was merely saying what much of Washington believes. Terrorism is the one major issue where Mr. McCain soundly vanquishes his Democratic opponent in the polls. Since 2002, it’s been a Beltway axiom akin to E=mc2 that Bomb in American City=G.O.P. Landslide.
That equation was the creation of Karl Rove. Among the only durable legacies of the Bush presidency are the twin fears that Mr. Rove relentlessly pushed on his client’s behalf: fear of terrorism and fear of gays. But these pillars are disintegrating too. They’re propped up mainly by political operatives like Mr. Black and their journalistic camp followers — the last Washington insiders who are still in Mr. Rove’s sway and are still refighting the last political war.
But you can’t blame the McCain campaign for clinging to terrorism as a political crutch. The other Rove fear card is even more tattered. In the wake of Larry Craig and Mark Foley, it’s a double-edged sword for the G.O.P. to trot out gay blades cavorting in pride parades in homosexual-panic ads.
Mr. McCain is trying to swing both ways. [...]
The Telegraph has learned that the former president's rage is still so great that even loyal allies are shocked by his patronising attitude to Mr Obama, and believe that he risks damaging his own reputation by his intransigence. A senior Democrat who worked for Mr Clinton has revealed that he recently told friends Mr Obama could "kiss my ass" in return for his support. Note: ROFLMAO!!!! Boy, you talk about taking it hard. There is no defeat like conceit!!!!
Retired U.S. Army General Wesley Clark, an adviser to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, said Republican contender John McCain has oversold his military and national-security experience.
"I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president," Clark said, referring to the incident that led to McCain's being taken prisoner of war in Vietnam. He also said McCain's service as a prisoner made him "a hero."
Bush Wants to Use Diplomacy With Iran
Will rename aircraft carrier “U.S.S. Diplomacy.”
Consumer Confidence Index Hits Bottom
Nobody thinks things will improve, ever.
FDA: Salmonella Outbreak Might Not Be Caused by Tomatoes After All
Consumers advised not to eat anything until further notice.
Audit: Justice Dept. Hired on Ideological Basis
If you believed in justice, you weren't hired.
High Court Slashes Exxon Valdez Spill Punitive Damages
Says ExxonMobil has "suffered enough."
Hollywood Braces for Possible Actors' Strike
Starbucks braces for glut of baristas.
Physicist: Tiny Chance Atom Smasher Will Create All-Consuming Death Star
Still, you should put on hold any plans beyond August.
"I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president."
A question for people older than me (I’m 34): There was a time in this country, wasn’t there, when people who thought Congress was in league with our nation’s mortal enemies, and actively, knowingly plotted with them to have Americans killed, were confined to street corners with urine-soaked refridgerator [sic] cartons and tinfoil hats, right?
Please tell me this was so, and that it could some day be that way again.
