In 2010, American voters foolishly aided and abetted the Republicans by giving them control of Congress.
We now enter a very dangerous period in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election.
If Obama is not re-elected, and people don't work towards returning workable majorities in the House and the Senate to the Democrats, then the country only continues its decline, and all will be lost.
It may be the end of a two century great social experiment unequaled in human history.
Returning the Democratic Party to the glory days of house and senate control that it had until Obama and the party were unable to convince enough people that their batsh*t crazy drive for bipartisanship with batsh*t crazy republicans was the only way to go, is the only way to go. There is no other reasonable way to go.
They tell us we're dropping about $10 billion a month in Afghanistan so we can catch that Bin Laden guy...but eventually, we're gonna catch him, and as soon as we do you can imagine that folks will be wondering why we're still over there - and I gotta tell ya, I'm one of those people.
I mean, we're over here talking about how we're so broke that we have no choice but to cut a couple of billion from heat assistance for the poor, and a billion-and-a-half from the Social Security operations budget, and money from food stamps and childcare assistance and tornado forecasting in Alabama...but every single month, just as regular as clockwork, we seem to be able to find another $10 billion to spend in Afghanistan, even as we have an economy that could badly use another round of truly productive stimulus.
And I don't think y'all even realize just how much money $10 billion really is - but today we're gonna see if we can't fix that with a bit of a thought exercise.
Imagine if we set up a program that took that Afghanistan money and spent it right here at home for a year or two - and it was spent in the form of a lottery, where we stimulate the larger economy, help fix the mortgage crisis, and create a more energy-independent nation, all at the same time.
I got all we need except a catchy name; with that in mind let's move on to the description of how the Happy Super Fun Day Peace Lotto Stimulus Thingy works.
It bears repeating that the mainstream news we're being fed on Libya is almost certainly inaccurate and skewed toward U.S. economic interests. In sum, it's propaganda; the probable intent of the propaganda, whether reporters know it or not, is U.S. military intervention. Just like in Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on and yada yada stretching back more than a century. (Afghanistan propaganda headlines, for example, are a constant part of the 'news'; here are two from today: Gates observes US progress in southern Afghanistan (AP), Obama thanks PM for Afghanistan role (The Age (Australia)).)
Illustration of the pain pathway in René Descartes' David Petraeus' Traite de l'homme (Treatise of Man) 1664 2011. The long fiber running from the foot to the cavity in Petraeus' head is pulled by the heat and releases a fluid that makes the muscles contract, retracting the foot from the fire and into the salving buccal mucosa.
Reports that Gen. David Petraeus, the top US Commander in Afghanistan, accused parents in rural Kunar Province of burning their children simply to make the US "look bad" sparked considerable consternation, and what passes these days for an "explanation" from the military.
Petraeus's insultingly awkward and racist evasion was made "awkwarder" when his spokesman clarified his meaning:
"Petraeus never said that children's hands and feet were purposely burned by their families in order to create a civilian casualty event," insisted spokesman Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, and here's where the explanation falls off the rails again.
"Rather, he said that the injuries to the children appeared inconsistent with the types of munitions used and that the burns to their hands and feet may have been the result of discipline sometimes handed out to Afghan children. Regrettably this is customary among some Afghan fathers as a way of dealing with children who misbehave," Smith continued.
That's right, the Afghan government wasn't mad that Petraeus said parents burned their kids to make him look bad, the Afghan government was mad because Petraeus said Afghan parents burn their kids all the time.
Kiev, Ukraine. Pavel would come home and take his little sister out to hunt mushrooms and I would tell him no, she must do her schoolwork! But they paid no attention and would rush out the door. She adored her big brother. I would follow them outside, ready to shout but Pavel would look back at me with that impish grin and I could not stay mad. He chose to be a helicopter pilot - he said if one is made to do something, one should benefit from it. He thought it would help him find work when he came home. After all these years, I still hope for a telephone call or a letter. There are times in the early morning I hear his voice, and I look for him in the garden.
The night is coming quickly,
And the stars are on their way,
As I stare into the evening,
Looking for the words to say.
About the long and lonely road the Left is on. About where we're going and where we've been. About the miles that lie ahead of us, about what we'll seek, and what we'll find. About what's been lost and left behind, by a nation bound for nowhere on the toll roads of the blind.
Halfway around the world tonight,
In a strange and foreign land,
A soldier packs his memories,
As he leaves Afghanistan.
And back home they don't know too much,
There's just no way to tell,
I guess you have to be there,
To know that war is hell . . .
Fort Lewis, Washington-- Barber sat in his truck wearing battle fatigues, earplugs and a camouflage hood on his head. He had an arsenal: seven loaded guns, nearly 1,000 rounds of ammunition, knives in his pockets. On the front seat, an AK-47 had a bullet in the chamber. Despite the firepower he brought with him, Barber, 31, took only one life that day. He killed himself with a shot to the head.
For two days, a surveillance camera recorded the truck sitting in the Madigan Army Medical Center parking lot. Inside the truck, the body lay undisturbed. If Josh Barber wanted his suicide to make a statement, no one seemed to notice.
It's been a week when nearly all big mainstream progressives immediately bashed Palin and the Republians on the back of the Tucson tragedy, thus displaying their gross, reflexive loyalty to the Democratic Party. And this happened even though the insanity of Jared Loughner emerged quickly (not criminally insane, but progressives need to question and fight law's immoral definitions), with his imaginings looking like the standard-issue product of paranoid schizophrenia. But, nobody sez whoops; nobody who bashed regrets a thing. Hey party loyalists, Palin (the Repubs' most likely to lose 2012 Prez candidate, btw, Dem Party strategists) is wounded, score some short-term points for the Dems! Good old crass, party-loyal discourse.
I wonder, though, what effect in a not-dominated-by-the-Democratic-Party progressive universe these Martin Luther King Jr. thoughts would have had; what if progressives had made them the center of their reaction to the Tucson tragedy:
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask - and rightly so - what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. ...
A new diplomatic cable leaked by Wikileaks shows top commanders in Afghanistan wrangling over the issue of what to call yet another troop escalation to re-gain footing in their faltering nine-year effort to control the country. "The Surge" used in Iraq was a fresh, sufficiently masculine and strength exuding name for the troop escalation, without actually referring to a "troop escalation" and being divorced from connotations of the ensuing gore and violence. Public opinion tolerated, and was even perhaps vaguely stirred by "the surge," which struck a nice balance between the need to project strength prudently while avoiding the pale of Rumsfeld's premature "shock and awe" rhetoric so many years into an ageing war.
But by the time "the surge" was re-deployed by General Petraeus in Afghanistan, it had already become somewhat stale-sounding, and uninspiring. Similarly, when George H.W. Bush invaded Iraq the first time, it was dramatically named "Operation Desert Storm," with the troops being led by Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf, but using the same name for the second invasion by George W. Bush simply was out of the question, so the second military action was idealistically re-branded "Operation Iraqi Liberation Freedom."
In its tenth year, support for the Afghanistan war is wearing thin, and "the surge" branding is thought by commanders to be losing appeal. Cables revealed that among candidates for re-branding the latest troop escalation (and reasons for rejection) were:
The billow and the swell weren't manly enough. The torrent seemed too excessive and "raging." The throb reminded everyone of headaches and boners. The blast was too violently explosive. The gush implied a loss of control -- open wounds and broken pipes gush. The pulse reminded everyone that Dick Cheney hasn't one. The uptick sounded small bore; plus it's often used in the phrase "the uptick in violence." The heave was associated with vomiting and death throes. The punch, the prod, the squash, and the squish sounded too aggressive, hectoring even. The push and the shove seemed rude. The squeeze were a band from the eighties. Everyone agreed it was "great song-writing." The goose seemed "too butt grabby." The thrust and the poke were too phallic. The press and the dig raised some eyebrows, but were somehow vague or basketbally. The dragooning reminded everyone of good old-fashioned browbeating and rendition. The ram, the steamroller, the bulldozer, pouring it on, going to town on, putting the screws to, etc., were dismissed as signs of growing frustration with the brainstorming process. It really was difficult to find a phrase having all the qualities of "the surge" without the negative associations. Finally, one commander suggested, "Howzabout just tellin' 'em we're "puttin' some starch in our shorts?""
The cables indicated that Petraeus will soon be announcing the nudge, something that can be done to persuade and encourage friends and allies without appearing overly domineering.
Cancel the War Is Over In Afghanistan celebrations you had planned for next summer. See below: Obama and Biden confirm that 2014 now is the year we pretend we'll be able to hand over Afghan security to the Afghan Virtual Army. After that news, an overview of fantasy versus reality in and on Afghanistan, since there's this weekend's 'big important' military occupation conference in Lisbon.
President Barack Obama pledged Friday that US forces would stand by Afghanistan even after NATO-led troops hand control of the fight against Taliban insurgents to Afghan forces in 2014.
Echoing the president's commitments, on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Vice President Joe Biden described 2014 as the "drop-dead date" for turning over security responsibilities to the Afghan government.
"And 2014 is now a date that everyone has agreed upon, NATO as well as the Afghanis, that's kind of the drop-dead date," said Biden. "But that doesn't mean we're going to have anywhere near 100,000 troops in 2013."
Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen confirms the '2011 was a joke' long-term intentions:
Asked about US plans to start bringing troops home next year, he said: "I'm not aware of concrete plans for withdrawal of troops.
"On the contrary, I think all allies are prepared to stay committed as long as it takes to finish our job."
But let's get to the fantasy world of these spokespeople for military occupation and a kleptocratic puppet government, the required conventional wisdom of everyone at the Lisbon conference. Here, for example, is President Obama, both feet deep in Afghani-Shamistan:
I'm offering the following to fill out on last week's very brief diary (see P.S. 2 for a belated explanation in reaction to the execution of the original).
... The Karzai regime has appointed a commission to investigate a US air strike that killed 31 Afghans last Friday. While occupation spokesmen claimed that all those who died were "insurgents," local residents demonstrated against what they charged was the slaughter of innocent men, women and children, and now the local governor has acknowledged that roughly half of the victims were civilians.
Meanwhile, the US military and the Central Intelligence Agency have dramatically escalated their shadowy war on the other side of the border in Pakistan. According to the New York Times, the number of missile strikes by pilotless drone aircraft has been doubled, with at least 21 having been conducted so far this month. ...
According to Pakistani authorities, 708 people were killed in 51 drone strikes in 2009, and another 600 or more have died in the 75 such strikes carried out so far this year. This adds up to more than 1,300 slaughtered since Obama entered the White House. The overwhelming majority of the victims - referred to vaguely by officials and the media as "suspected militants" - are civilians, including women and children.
I read a piece last night by Jason Linkins at Huff Post in which he describes the experience of CNN correspondent Michael Ware and Ware's difficulty in dealing with the memory of the death of a presumably innocent young Iraqi shot execution style by US troops in 2007.
Mr Ware tells of the alleged incident he says he witnessed and filmed in 2007 when working for US news giant CNN, but claims the network decided the footage was too graphic to go to air.
He alleges that a teenager in a remote Iraqi village run by the militant Islamist group, al-Qaeda was carrying a weapon to protect himself.
"(The boy) approached the house we were in and the (US) soldiers who were watching our backs, one of them put a bullet right in the back of his head. Unfortunately it didn't kill him," he tells Australian Story.
"We all spent the next 20 minutes listening to his tortured breath as he died."
Ware left CNN last spring after being denied extended time off when apparently suffering from PTSD from his experiences. I respected Ware's work as a corespondent and wish him well. I also know that he has an important story to tell when the time is right.
Thousands of our kids, if they come home at all, are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan physically wounded and carrying the enormous weight of the emotional baggage picked up during their experience of war. This is nothing new, we brought back the same cargo from Vietnam, Korea and WW2. All wars provide their participants with a dismal tide of dark memories, the material of a lifetime of tortured nightmares.
Gottlieb and Diane G. are live and in color (or is that off color?) on WWL radio Friday night at 6pm Eastern Time to guide you through Current Events taken from a Wildly Left Prospective.
Hear the Unreported & Under Reported Headlines stories you should be paying attention to, from US Politics, to the farthest reaches of the Earth by the WWL coalition of subversion: undermining the PTB by speaking Truth to Power!!!!
1984 much anyone? Come to the land through the looking glass yet again; where attacking an innocent Country and destroying it is Victory, where leaving means staying, where Oil spills become the Norm, where both Parties are One and Slavery is the best end-game for our economic system.
We have myriad breaking news stories to cover, friends, listeners and lunatics... but really? We wish the song remained the same... but no, it IS getting worse.
******
Be heard by joining in our live chat, or calling in! Spread the message by telling your friends to listen in or sending them the podcasts!
Please join us for the only "out there where the buses don't run" LEFT perspective on the breaking news!
Controversy? We face it. Cutting Edge? We step over it. Revolutions start with information, and The Wild Wild Left Radio brings you the best in information and op/eds from a position that others on the Left fear to tread.
Call In!
Join Diane and Gottlieb every Friday at 6pm EDT on Wild Wild Left Radio, via BlogtalkRadio, for News from the Real Left. No hand-wringing, no PC, just straight talk from reality based politics.
WWL Radio: Free Speech in Practice.
The call in number is 646-929-1264
The live chat link will go live around 5:20.. found at the bottom of the show page, or by clicking the link below!
Gen. Stan McChrystal, United States Army, will leave active service with four stars instead of three because of a special waiver bestowed on him by President Barack Obama. One is supposed to hold four-star rank for three years before one can retire at that pay grade, something McChrystal obviously didn't do, but Obama made nice and let him walk away with a full set of collar candy anyway. The extra star makes a staunch bit of difference in McChrystal's retirement pay. He'll start at $181,416 per year versus the measly $160,068 he would have received otherwise. But both of those amounts are chump change compared to what Mr. McChrystal is likely to knock down in his Beltway banditry career.
Noted counterinsurgency illusionist John A. Nagl, a retired Army light colonel and a Beltway bandit himself, says that "forcing" McChrystal to retire with three stars "would have sent a signal that he was out of favor." Colleagues, according to the New York Times, say that because McChrystal kept his fourth star he's not "radioactive," so he can expect a bright future "as a well-paid outside consultant to the Pentagon or a government intelligence agency." Don't be shocked to see McChrystal named CEO of whatever Blackwater winds up calling itself next.
Retired three-star Beltway bandit Jack Keane, a key node in the war mafia's AIPAC-neocon-Pentagon-Congress-White House connections, says of his protégé McChrystal, "Stan will land on both feet, make no mistake about that."
Lynndie England, the marginally self-aware former private in the United States Army Reserve, was one of the few bad apples who took the fall for the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. She received no pension at all after she left the Army with a dishonorable discharge, and she couldn't get back her civilian job as a chicken-plucker after she was released from military prison.
That's the AP headline on Yahoo news at the moment. Hard. to. take. sometimes. So he's not a turncoat when he fights and kills for the US/UK occupation and its Karzai puppet, who was allowed to steal the last national election, but he is a turncoat when he joins the fighting majority trying to kick out the foreigners occupying a country, his country, for the fun and profit of those foreigners' corporations and politicians?
For a brief and shining moment, well more or less just July 1 & 2, a major mainstream political leader told the truth everyone knows about Afghanistan: it's unwinnable. And he even held his ground for, like, a day. As a consequence, Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele was attacked without mercy by both parties and all of official Washington. That's even though we all know Steele is right, and we all know our first priority, saving Afghan lives, and second priority, saving foreign soldier lives, mean we need to get international military forces quickly removed from Afghanistan. Here's Steele, taboo busting:
This was a war of Obama's choosing. This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in. . . .
It was the president who was trying to be cute by half by flipping a script demonizing Iraq, while saying the battle really should be in Afghanistan. Well, if he's such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right, because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed. And there are reasons for that. There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan.
Wow, refreshing, a normal person might at first react. Admittedly, you could question the beginning of the statement, since we all know Bush started the Afghan war; but it is also true that after deposing the Taliban Bush kept the war on low or simmer for the rest of his time in office. And Obama has turned the heat way up, doubling the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan (and unleashing McChrystal's assassination squads there, btw). In that reasonable benefit-of-the-doubt context, Steele's first two sentences above are accurate. But oh, what a second paragraph: right on Mr. Steele, and take that, warmongers!
As you'd expect, military-industrial complex and warmonger Republicans are on the anti-Steele warpath. And the other war party, the Democrats, are also attacking Steele, nearly accusing him of treason (yup, that soundsBush-erafamiliar). As if we haven't known it for awhile, the party and President swooped into office by peacenik votes is also the other'support the war or it'll make the troops feel bad' party:
Gottlieb and Diane G. will be live and in color (or is that off color?) on WWL radio tonight at 6pm Eastern Time to guide you through Current Events taken from a Wildly Left Prospective.
Hear the Unreported & Under Reported Headlines stories you should be paying attention to, from US Politics, to the farthest reaches of the Earth by the WWL coalition of subversion: undermining the PTB by speaking Truth to Power!!!!
This week we are honored to again host our returning Special Guest Cmdr Jeff Huber, author of "Bathtub Admirals," columnist for Antiwar.com and his own blog, Pen and Sword, as well as a frequent essayist on yours truly, WWL.
Jeff will be analyzing the dismissal of General McChrystal and the replacement with General Petraeus and its possible portends for our theater in Afghanistan. He will also try and shed light on the Naval escalation in the Red Sea, as we join Israel in threatening Iran.
Time permitting, an update on the never ending Gulf Disaster will be provided as well.
Speak up, as we do every Friday, with us on-air, or by telling your friends to listen and sending them the podcasts!
Please join us for the only "out there where the buses don't run" LEFT perspective on the breaking news!
Controversy? We face it. Cutting Edge? We step over it. Revolutions start with information, and The Wild Wild Left Radio brings you the best in information and op/eds from a position that others on the Left fear to tread.
Call In!
Join Gottlieb and Diane every Friday at 6pm EDT on Wild Wild Left Radio, via BlogtalkRadio, for News from the Real Left. No hand-wringing, no PC, just straight talk from reality based politics.
WWL Radio: Free Speech in Practice.
The call in number is 646-929-1264
The live chat link will go live around 5:20.. found at the bottom of the show page, or by clicking the link below!
American imperialism (like Israel's, actually, but that's another diary (that I would be advised on eurotrib to confine to a comment)) will be deterred by effective guerrilla resistance, budget constraints, and/or by politicians among its major 'allies' forced to act against U.S. demands/commands by strong and voting antiwar movements. The latter doesn't appear to be happening now, not in Britain or Germany, the numbers 2 and 3 in contributions to the U.S. (okay, NATO fig leaf) occupation army in Afghanistan. But, somehow, despite the CIA's efforts, I think prospects for effective war opposition (especially during economic hard times) is better there than it is in the States.
We now know why Petraeus passed out like a girl at his Senate testimony last week. He knew his days of being able to make "Bananas" Stan McChrystal the scapegoat for Af-Pak were numbered.
The pratfall Dave Petraeus took face-first into his microphone during his farcical testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee last Tuesday channeled the Twix candy bar commercial that asks: "Need a moment?" As the New York Times put it, the Teflon General was facing some intense questioning on the president's order to begin reducing American forces in Afghanistan next year when he "slumped toward the microphone on his table." Maybe Dave just needed some time think things over. Maybe he needed to stall while his driver ran out to see if he left his crib sheet in his government sedan.
The general returned to the floor a half hour after later claiming he "just got dehydrated." Must have been from all the heat he was catching from the committee.
The hearing's running gag was a manhood dance between committee members who wanted Petraeus to come right out and say Obama's withdrawal timeline for Afghanistan makes dirt look smart and Petraeus wanting to agree that Obama's timeline makes dirt look smart without coming right out and saying it. This bit of patter between Petraeus and committee chairman Carl Levin deserves an Emmy:
Levin: "Do you continue to support that July 2011 date for the start of reduction in U.S. forces from Afghanistan?"
Petraeus: "I support the policy of the president, Mr. Chairman..."
Levin: "When you say that you continue to support the president's policy ... does that represent your best personal professional judgment?"
Petraeus: "In a perfect world, Mr. Chairman, we have to be very careful with timelines..."
Levin: "Do I take that to be a qualified yes, a qualified no, or just a non-answer?"
Diane Gee's Wild, Wild Left is a Multi-authored collaboration of the Best and the Brightest moving the World to a Sane & Equitable Future for the World!
Join in!
In 2010, American voters foolishly aided and abetted the Republicans by giving them control of Congress.
