It's not just the Republican candidates, or Republicans for that matter.
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Tuesday, March 13, 2012
U.S. Officials Debate Speeding Afghan Pullout
It's not just the Republican candidates, or Republicans for that matter.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
U.S. Officials Debate Speeding Afghan Pullout
Our attack and occupation of Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11.
When 15 of the hijackers were Saudi nationals, one Egyptian, one Lebanese and 2 from the UAE and, as two of the senators who sat on the 9/11 Commission have come forward recently under oath about the Saudi royals involvement and support, the proper response to 9/11 would have been to take out the House of Saud.
This is the reason we attacked Afghanistan.
It's difficult for many of us to comprehend this, but the US government does not see its job as to protect American citizens. As someone who has lost someone in an act of terrorism, I can tell you firsthand that the government does not react or respond to terror attacks unless they interfere with commerce. Until terror attacks cut into the rich's ability to make obscene profits. When terror attacks cause people to stop flying, stop shopping, then the government will act. But in a way where more money can be made for phat cats, and not in a way that guarantees our Constitutional rights.
The government and the military exist to protect transnational corporations. And Obama has signed on to that. It's a win-win with everybody making loads of money, except us. Except We the People. It's not making us safe or even safer (it's actually putting us in greater danger), and we're going broke in the process.
About Afghanistan
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U.S. Officials Debate Speeding Afghan Pullout
'Hijacking Catastrophe' (a 2004 documentary):
"The war in Iraq was very very clearly about oil, as was the war in Afghanistan. The oil pipeline that was planned (in Afghanistan), the best security for that was an occupation."
"If you map the proposed pipeline route across Afghanistan and you look at our bases? Matches perfectly. Our bases are there to solve a problem that the Taliban couldn't solve. Taliban couldn't provide security in that part of Afghanistan -- Well now that's where our bases are. So, does that have to do with Osama Bin Laden? It has nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden. It has everything to do with the longer plan, in this case a strategy which I wouldn't necessarily call neoconservative, however it fits perfectly in with the neoconservative ideology which says, 'If you have military force and you need something from a weaker country, then you need to deploy that force and take what you need because your country's needs are paramount'. It's the whole idea of unilateralism, of using force to achieve your aims."
-Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel whose assignments included a variety of roles for the National Security Agency and who spent her last 4 1/2 years working at the Pentagon with Donald Rumsfeld
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUxI3rSLDO8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SltOy_F6ZII
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U.S. Officials Debate Speeding Afghan Pullout
MADDOW: America, it‘s your tax dollars at work. This is the war economy as translated to land-locked Central Asia. We dump a ton of money thinking that we are paying for our military effort. Everything that goes along with our military effort ends up letting - or in this case, directing like a squirt gun, instead of flooding -
ENGEL: The streets become rivers of mud.
MADDOW: But the money doesn‘t go to the country and trickle down its economy. It just goes to the elites and power brokers who can keep it for themselves.
ENGEL: A war lord system. There is a lot of money in war - contracting, supplying, shipping. And if you have been in power, you keep those contracts for yourself and you build neighborhoods like this. And maybe, you don‘t even live here. You live somewhere else, in a foreign country.
MADDOW: This is what it is like in Kabul. This is the exact same dynamic that we saw in Kandahar where you‘re talking with these counterinsurgency doctors and soaked military officers who are incredibly smart and have far reaching thinking about this sort of thing and they can because of that, they can see the basic contradiction at work that we‘re trying to do.
If the whole effort, all the money and everything, is to establish governance and - if the whole effort is to establish governance, all of our money, all of our spending here is only supporting the elite, the warlordism -
About Afghanistan
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
U.S. Officials Debate Speeding Afghan Pullout
ENGEL: Exactly. And the reason the streets are still unpaved is that these government officials refuse to pay any taxes to the government. They are in a fight so the government won‘t come and pave the roads or connect it to any kind of sanitation system at all because the same government ministers won‘t pay to register the neighborhood.
MADDOW: So they won‘t throw their weight around to get their neighborhood taken care of, because they don‘t live here anyway.
ENGEL: They don‘t live here anyway. So you have these large homes, and some of these homes - you see this building right behind you?
MADDOW: That looks like a hotel.
ENGEL: No. No. No. They are all private homes.
MADDOW: This is a private home?
ENGEL: It‘s a private home. It probably has 25 bedrooms in it and garish, colonnades and unusual architectural features. And then, they‘ll rent that out to some western client and they‘ll charge either by the bedroom or by the floor or for the whole thing. And if you were to build this one - it‘s obviously under construction - that is a $1 million plus house in Kabul with no paved streets.
KEEP READING
About Afghanistan
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
U.S. Officials Debate Speeding Afghan Pullout
ENGEL: Because this was originally just empty land. You can see there is no real pavement or anything like that. When the Americans came in with the northern alliance (the northern alliance, which was the allies against the Taliban) took this land and then gave it away to all their cronies. They created a new war wealth neighborhood out of nothing.
MADDOW: And so we‘ve still got open sewers and we‘ve still got no pavement, but we have rococo castles. Nouveau riche castles.
ENGEL: That lease for $10,000 to $25,000 a month, because it‘s a safe area. But here‘s the irony. Most of the government officials - and these are almost all owned by government officials - don‘t live in them. They rent them out to foreign companies, contractors. And they live in Dubai or have their families in Islamabad. So they are purely investment properties.
MADDOW: There‘s a sign right there in that one. It says, “house for rent.”
KEEP READING
About Afghanistan
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
U.S. Officials Debate Speeding Afghan Pullout
"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
What's to debate? Bring them all home now.
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U.S. Officials Debate Speeding Afghan Pullout
"U.S. Officials Debate Speeding Afghan Pullout" implies that we're in the process of leaving Afghanistan, leaving Afghanistan, leaving it to the Afghan people, when if you read the article, that's not true.
The "pullout" being discussed is about just decreasing the number of troops, 20,000 from the 100,000 (this figure doesn't include the privatized mercenaries and CIA's forces we're running there).
What's the objective, how is the military going about achieving it, and where are our tax dollars going?
Not long ago, Rachel Maddow walked the dusty, garbage-strewn streets of Afghanistan with RIchard Engel to see what exporting US-style democracy means, and what US nation-building actually builds. Watch this to see where are our tax dollars going, and learn how we are not "nation-building", not making us safer, and not helping the Afghans or building their nation at all (or a democracy). Learn how this has all been just a huge rip-off of the American people:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR5BHnN__5M
RACHEL MADDOW: There are very few countries in the world poorer than Afghanistan where abject poverty is almost everywhere. The keyword there is almost. There are super rich folks here. We visited their neighborhood in Kabul. They‘re garish, bizarre. What it looks like to be rich in poor, war-torn, land-locked Central Asian neighborhood.
MADDOW: So we are in a neighborhood now. Kabul. Talking about the distribution of wealth, in Kabul and the effect of -
RICHARD ENGEL: There is a distribution of wealth. This is where it is distributed. This is where it ends up. All of the money from contracts and association with the government and association with the U.S. military has ended up here.
MADDOW: Why?
KEEP READING
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BP's Influence Peddling In Congress Bears Fruit Two Years After Gulf Spill
Democrats have abandoned reproductive/pro-choice rights.
It's out of the business of being pro-choice because it's trying to turn the Democratic Party into the old Republican Party, grow the Democratic Party by attracting into the party anybody it can. It hasn't actually announced it publicly, but it only goes through the motions of seeming to be champions of women's reproductive choice. When it comes to actually championing the issue, Democratic politicians are AWOL, not only at the top, at the party organization, but absent also are the politicians whose talk as women's champions don't match the walk.
I'll explain:
You can't have anti-choice politicians in the Democratic Party, receiving money and support from the Democratic Party's members and the party's machinery, when the platform of the party clearly states that Democrats "unequivocally support R0e v. W@de and a woman's right to choose a safe and legal ab0rt!on, regardless of ability to pay, and oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right".
Yet the Democratic party's elites, the Democratic establishment, have set out to make the Democratic party hospitable to anti-choice people (and all 'other siders' of the Democratic Party's different special interest groups) , as noted in this article from 12/04.
The only way to do that is for the party to not take a stance on abortion, to remove any reference to 'choice'. That's certainly true of Howard Dean. During Howard Dean's tenure as chairman of the DNC, he indicated in several interviews that the intent was to move the Democratic Party from referring to abortion at all in its platform. Here's one of those interviews, from 11/1/05: Video | Transcript
January 14, 2005 - Dems May Waver on Choice, Repro Rights
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BP's Influence Peddling In Congress Bears Fruit Two Years After Gulf Spill
Even the most pro-choice of Democrats in Congress, alleged stalwarts who've spent entire careers, decades in public office, have failed miserably to protect women's rights and have let it get to this point. One example would be Barbara Boxer.
In 2006, Democratic senators and the Democratic machine publicly supported Democratic candidate NedLamont who was running for senator in Connecticut against newly independent JoeLieberman. Privately, working behind-the-scenes, Democratic senators and former president BillClinton were working to help Lieberman raise money to beat Lamont, and Republican AlanSchlesinger. Before Lamont won the primary, when Lieberman was still a Democrat, Boxer stumped for Lieberman. She was asked how she could support him given that Lieberman supports hospitals receiving public monies refusing to give contraceptives to r@pe victims, and instead of dodging Lieberman, dropping him like the bad character he is, she dodged the issue.
During the Bush-Cheney administration, she wrote two murder mysteries, because "It was always something I wanted to do if I had the time."
In the 2010 midterm campaign, I asked rhetorically, "If Republicans win back control of Congress, do you think Democrats will be as effective at stymieing Republicans' agenda as Republicans have been the last two years at stymieing Obama's/Democrats' 2008 agenda?" If what Democratic politicians did during the BushCheney years is any indication, no. Let's look at some of the alleged champions of liberals' issues.
BarbaraBoxer has been a terrible champion of liberal issues, but only those paying attention know this.
For example, as a member of Congress, you can't just be for or against something (like abortion) when it comes up for a vote. You have to be meticulous and actively work to set up the conditions surrounding your vote, to make sure it counts. Your 'yes' vote means nothing if there are more 'no' votes to cancel your vote/voice out.
Knowing that, what did Boxer do the entire 8 years of the BushAdministration? She effectively went on sabbatical. She wrote murder mysteries ("Something I always wanted to do, if I ever had the time"). She, of course, took her senatorial salary all those years.
Boxer's support of JoeLieberman in 2006 exposed Boxer's very 'conditional' support of a woman's right to choose (and her general level of ignorance)
http://firedoglake.com/2006/07/24/the-boxer-meltdown/
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Joe Biden: Eric Cantor Told Me, 'I'll Lose My Position' If I Cut A Debt Deal With You
Obama's great big giveaway to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries was passed through reconciliation. 50 +1. Lieberman wasn't needed.
And Republicans didn't filibuster; they threatened to filibuster.
Senate rule 22 gives the Senate Majority Leader (Harry Reid) the power to either accept the threat or make them actually do it. Whenever Reid has made them do it, whenever Reid has called the GOP's bluff, they've crumbled. Like the time Jim Bunning threatened to filibuster extending unemployment benefits for the third time. Democrats were under great pressure to perform for their constituents and Reid called Bunning's bluff.
Bunning folded and unemployment benefits were extended.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Joe Biden: Eric Cantor Told Me, 'I'll Lose My Position' If I Cut A Debt Deal With You
Obama and Democrats would love for us to believe it's all the Republicans' fault, but it's not true.
Yes, Republicans are scvm, but the fact of the matter is that Democrats don't need Republicans for passing anything. Democrats enjoy a greater majority in both houses of Congress than either party has in decades. Even without 60. But Obama doesn't need 60 to pass legislation. He doesn't need Republicans to pass legislation.
All Democrats need: 50 + Biden
But they won't do that.
Democrats also won't exercise the discretion that Rule 22 allows: Making Republicans actually filibuster, instead of just threatening to do it.
Rule 22 gives the SenateMajorityLeader the discretion to actually make the call. Filibustering is hard on those soft, pampered bodies. HarryReid should them do it, over every issue where they threaten to do it -- Americans love reality TV. 'Survivor - Washington, DC'.
But Obama & the DLC-controlled DemocraticParty aren't doing that. Because it might actually work to get Democratic voters' legislative agenda made into the law of the land & do good for the People. And that's not what Obama&Company are there for. They are there to do the work of the transnational corporations, and preventing that are the liberals.
So Obama reaches out for Republicans, watering down the legislation that they won't vote for. Because everything that the parties do, both parties, is for the next election campaign.
Democrats could even change the supermajority rule, do it by SIMPLE majority (50 + 1).
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Joe Biden: Eric Cantor Told Me, 'I'll Lose My Position' If I Cut A Debt Deal With You
When NancyPelosi boasts of getting 420 pieces of legislation passed, I ask "What's the big accomplishment of getting 420 pieces of legislation passed in one chamber of Congress but not the other?" It only becomes law when both chambers pass it.
Democrats in both chambers of Congress work as a team. And when they also hold the WhiteHouse, the president controls all of it. They identify what they hope to achieve (pro-corporate legislation) and then strategize how to get it while saving each other's hides with constituents come election time.
Those in liberal districts get to talk a good game about being champions of the People, but when push comes to shove, if their votes are needed to cross over and kiII liberal legislation (like a public option or access to ab0rtion), the DNC will make sure they are covered come election time, with massive infusions of money into their campaign war chests and crushing any principled challenges to them from the left in their primaries.
Here's an example of how they tag team us:
LynnWoolsey, head of the ProgressiveCaucus, likes to brag that she was the first to bring a resolution to end the war in Iraq. She, and congressional Democrats, and Obama, ran on ending the practice of paying for the wars through supplemental emergency spending bills, and putting the wars on budget (see why that is significant here).
Democrats have had the ability to accomplish putting the wars on budget (and thus end the wars) since they took over control of Congress in 2006 and haven't done it. They haven't needed Republicans to do this.
As the head of the ProgressiveCaucus, LynnWoolsey led 79 of the 82 members of the caucus to pledge that they would not vote for any healthcare reform legislation that didn't include a PublicOption.
Woolsey then led the 79 to renege on the pledge.
Unbeknownst to LynnWoolsey's constitutents (it was never reported in her district's newspapers): Progressive CongresswomanWoolsey Endorses ProWar BlueDog JaneHarman Over Progressive MarcyWinograd
Democrats have let Obama continue with just about all of BushCheney's policies, and wars, and let Obama go BushCheney even better, by letting Obama assert, unchallenged, that presidents have the right to k!ll Americans with no due process or oversight, push for 'preventive detention' and no transparency of anything a president asserts should be his secret.
Democrats have abdicated their Constitutionally-required role of oversight of the executive branch; they failed to perform it during the BushCheney administration, and still don't with one of their own in the WhiteHouse.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
BP's Influence Peddling In Congress Bears Fruit Two Years After Gulf Spill
Democrats have been more than willing to sell out their base groups's interests, but particularly women's and the pro-choice movement's. And Obama's been particularly 'oily', slippery, on these issues. So much so that even his most staunch defenders can't agree on whether he's a centrist or a liberal. [Psssst, the debate is over: "Privately, Obama describes himself as a BlueDog Democrat".]
One example of how Democrats and Obama are real free and easy "compromising away" a base group's interests is Democrats' healthcare legislation which opens the door to ending insurance coverage of all abortions). We wouldn't be down to this horrifying situation where you can't get an abortion in 92 percent of the counties in the US (as well as 3 states in the country that have only one abortion clinic, and other states that heavily restrict a woman's access to abortion, and banning abortions in clinics or any facility that receives public funds, and banning abortion counseling and clinic recommendations) if Democrats and Obama weren't so breezy with women's hard-fought for rights.
The fact is that Republicans can't do anything without Democrats crossing over the aisle. Faux Democrats are the problem. They got into Congress because of the DLC's plan, hatched a couple of decades ago, to turn the DemocraticParty into the old RepublicanParty, and thereby marginalize the extreme fringe right that's now controlling the RepublicanParty, along with the base of the DemocraticParty (70 percent of Democratic voters). Then they'd "govern the country for 100 years".
To those who defend Obama and the DLC-controlled Democrats and their practice of 'compromise I say, "We've been doing it your way, the DLC's way, for 20 years now, and the government and the DemocraticParty keeps moving farther to the right. That's because your way is to l!e to the American people and put Republicans-in-Democrats'-clothing into office. At the rate this is going, Republicans won't have to bother getting Roe overturned -- Why bother outlawing abortion when you've made it virtually impossible to obtain one?
If you and I are on the same side (as you insist), and want real Democratic policies, and going about getting them your way (protecting Obama, reelecting DLC Democrats) is getting Republican policies, NOT Democratic policies, when do you realize that maybe you don't know what you're talking about?
When do you realize that you've become that classic definition for 'insan!ty' ("Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results")?
Do you ever realize it?
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
BP's Influence Peddling In Congress Bears Fruit Two Years After Gulf Spill
We're not limited to voting for just Democrats and Republicans. There are other alternatives besides sitting out the election or voting for Republicans. There are other candidates running as independents, from Green to Libertarian, in just about every race. If for no other reason than to get the 5 percent that is necessary for getting a seat at the table, I think that may be enough for great numbers of Democratic voters this time around.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Joe Biden: Eric Cantor Told Me, 'I'll Lose My Position' If I Cut A Debt Deal With You
I think commenters here, particularly Obama's 'most ardent admirers' (those who excuse his and Democrats' failure to achieve their constituents' goals) are missing the bigger picture here: If what Biden says is true, then a public option, closing Guantanamo, Bush's Tax Cuts for the rich, etc., weren't things that Obama wanted. Or else what Biden said of Republicans ("There's nobody in charge") is also true of Democrats.
There is nothing that Democrats in Congress are doing that Obama hasn't signed off on, much less ordered.
When you are the president, you are the head of your political party. When your political party controls both Houses of Congress and the WhiteHouse, you do what the head of your party tells you to do. The only people who don't understand this are those who've never worked in politics.
Democrats like to hide this from the people, and lend the illusion of democracy (small 'd'), like "herding cats", "no organized party", etc., but that's how it is, and it's the only reason there are political parties. If you don't get behind what the leader of your political party tells you to do, you're going to find your life really cold and lonely for the duration of your term in office. Come election time, you won't have the party behind you, and that is certain death for your time in office.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost