Politics

Here are the winning ads from MoveOn.org’s ad campaign. It looks like they’re also raising funds to put the winning ad on the Super Bowl. Cool.

One day is all it took for the Bush’s administration to start investigating whether Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill used confidential documents to provide information for Ron Suskind’s new book The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill, a book that exposes Bush’s lies about weapons of mass destruction, 9/11, and the unnecessary tax cuts that Bush imposed on us.
74 days is how long it took for Bush’s administration to begin investigation of the White House leak of the identity of an active CIA agent which compromised her safety, the missions she was working on, and national security of America itself.
So apparently, it’s okay to leak documents as long as they cover George Bush’s ass, but if you leak documents that embarrass Bush, you’ll get hammered.
And, BTW, the document’s O’Neill used for the book have quickly been proven to not be confidential or a security risk, but you won’t hear that on the news for three or four more days, when the White House has convinced everyone that O’Neill did something wrong.

George W. Bush quote monitoring websites:
Slate’s Complete Bushisms
Dubya Speak
Bush Watch
The Truth About George
“See, free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don’t attack each other. Free nations don’t develop weapons of mass destruction.”� GWB, Milwaukee, Wis., Oct. 3, 2003
Yep, that’s actually true. Too bad America is no longer one of those.

On Sept. 26, 2002, U.S. immigration officials seized a Syrian-born Canadian at Kennedy International Airport, because his name had come up on an international watch list for possible terrorists. What happened next is chilling.
Maher Arar was about to change planes on his way home to Canada after visiting his wife’s family in Tunisia when he was pulled aside for questioning. He was not a terrorist. He had no terrorist connections, but his name was on the list, so he was detained for questioning. Not ordinary, polite questioning, but abusive, insulting, degrading questioning by the immigration service, the FBI and the New York City Police Department. If you wish to know about the eligibility to file adjustment of status (AOS), for immigration related queries, then check them out here!
He asked for a lawyer and was told he could not have one. He asked to call his family, but phone calls were not permitted. Instead, he was clapped into shackles and, for several days, made to “disappear.” His family was frantic.
Finally, he was allowed to make a call. His government expected that Arar’s right of safe passage under its passport would be respected. But it wasn’t. Arar denied any connection to terrorists. He was not accused of any crimes, but U.S. agents wanted him questioned further by someone whose methods might be more persuasive than theirs.
So, they put Arar on a private plane and flew him to Washington, D.C. There, a new team, presumably from the CIA, took over and delivered him, by way of Jordan, to Syrian interrogators. This covert operation was legal, our Justice Department later claimed, because Arar is also a citizen of Syria by birth. The fact that he was a Canadian traveling on a Canadian passport, with a wife, two children and job in Canada, and had not lived in Syria for 16 years, was ignored. The Justice Department wanted him to be questioned by Syrian military intelligence, whose interrogation methods our government has repeatedly condemned.
The Syrians locked Arar in an underground cell the size of a grave: 3 feet wide, 6 feet long, 7 feet high. Then they questioned him, under torture, repeatedly, for 10 months. Finally, when it was obvious that their prisoner had no terrorist ties, they let him go, 40 pounds lighter, with a pronounced limp and chronic nightmares.

What have we become?

Okay, here’s my question… if we’re going to have manned space flights to both the moon and to mars, in a time when people are out of work and when schools are cutting back their education programs including music and arts (but not of course, sports), and when most state economies are going bankrupt and American soldiers are getting their asses shot off for questionable reasons…
… then can the guy we send up there be George W. Bush? ‘Cause that seems like a darned good place for him; outer space. I’m sure he’d look great in the flight suit. And it would be about like the chimps we used to send.

Saw an interesting interview with Ron Suskind, reporter and author of the new book The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill. Paul O’Neill was Former Treasury Secretary for the Bush White House, as well as for Nixon, Ford, Reagan, etc.
O’Neill, fired by the White House for his disagreement on tax cuts, helps Suskind builds an insider’s picture of the White House drawn on interviews with O’Neill, dozens of other Bush administration insiders and 19,000 documents provided by O’Neill.
Biggest bombshell revealed in the book: O’Neill, White House insider, says Bush was planning to go to war against Iraq immediately upon becoming president, eight months before 9/11.
Key quotes: President Bush was so disengaged in cabinet meetings that he �was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people.� It was similar in one-on-one meetings, says O’Neill. Of his first such meeting with the president, O’Neill says, “I went in with a long list of things to talk about and, I thought, to engage [him] on…I was surprised it turned out me talking and the president just listening…It was mostly a monologue.”

Some key headlines:
Washington Post: Iraq’s Arsenal Was Only on Paper
But investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen — combining pox virus and snake venom — that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months.
New York Times: U.S. Withdraws a Team of Weapons Hunters From Iraq
The Bush administration has quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for military equipment, according to senior government officials. The step was described by some military officials as a sign that the administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expected to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House cited as a principal reason for going to war last March.
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: WMD in Iraq
– Iraq WMD Was Not An Immediate Threat
– Intelligence Failed and Was Misrepresented
– Terrorist Connection Missing
– Post-War WMD Search Ignored Key Resources
– War Was Not the Best-Or Only-Option

I got several e-mails from Christians regarding this posting below, asking me not to judge all Christians by the men I noted, and saying that they feel they love the sinner, and hate the sin.
Here’s my problem with that…. the fact that ANY Christian that promotes the idea of executing me is absolutely UNACCEPTABLE. I don’t care that most Christians take the “love the sinner, hate the sin” attitude (I have a problem with that, too; that I’ll cover in a future post). I care that are are SOME Christians that think they should be allowed to execute me. And the guys I noted… they have access to lots of money, and to high profile people in our government. And none of those high profile people have ever condemned those beliefs. They do say, “well, that’s not what I believe” but they don’t take a stand against the beliefs of their friends.
The fact that people who want to execute me have access to lots of money and to high profile government officials, and the fact that some express willingness to go around the law of the land if it doesn’t fit with their beliefs, makes me believe they are a CREDIBLE THREAT to my well being.

Nobody seems to believe me when I say that’s on the agenda of at least some religious right… but this is the second time I’ve seen it in print lately… this time in a Salon article about millionaire Howard Ahmanson Jr., a religious fanatic who has funded every major right wing cause from the recall election in California, to the schism in the Episcopal church to Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign.
Right there on the second page of the article:

“It was then that he found his salvation in the church and in R.J. Rushdoony, a prolific author and an influential theologian of the far right. Rushdoony is the father of Christian Reconstructionism, a strange variant of Calvinism that stresses waging political struggle to put the earth, and in particular the U.S., under the control of biblical law. In his 30-some books, he advocated everything from the end of government-administered social welfare and public schools to the execution of homosexuals. For around 20 years, until Rushdoony’s death in 1995, Ahmanson served on the board of his think tank, Chalcedon, granting it a total of $1 million. In exchange, Rushdoony acted as Ahmanson’s spiritual advisor, imbuing him with a sense of order and a mission.”