My apologies to Kayla and anyone else waiting for Isaiah's latest The World Today Just Nuts to go up. I got lost on BuzzFlash and in the e-mails.
Obviously, members have been there this weekend but before I note the e-mails from this morning and yesterday (sorry, I was working with The Third Estate Sunday Review, Betty and Rebecca most of the night and didn't have time to read e-mails until this morning), I want to note The Third Estate Sunday Review's editorial this week:
The Sunday Times has an article by Michael Smith entitled "RAF bombing raids tried to goad Saddam into war." It opens with the following:
THE RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war, new evidence has shown.
The attacks were intensified from May, six months before the United Nations resolution that Tony Blair and Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, argued gave the coalition the legal basis for war. By the end of August the raids had become a full air offensive.
The details follow the leak to The Sunday Times of minutes of a key meeting in July 2002 at which Blair and his war cabinet discussed how to make "regime change" in Iraq legal.
Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, told the meeting that "the US had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime".
We realize that our readers are far more intelligent than the mainstream press corp but indulge us we address the above. The Bully Boy and his cohorts went around screaming that we didn't want a "mushroom cloud," that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons. To accept those lies today, in the face of The Sunday Times of London's story, you have to accept that the Bully Boy was perfectly okay with the United States being attacked with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. If that were true, then the only response would be to call for an immediate impeachment. The leader of the country is not supposed to actively court the destruction of our nation.
As noted further down in the editorial, the link to this story was found at BuzzFlash. When everything but the editorial is done, we all usually go running to BuzzFlash and other sites to find a topic to advocate for being the editorial. There are usually several topics proposed and then there's a vote on which one to go with. This was the top of the page, large print, main headline on BuzzFlash and I doubt anyone went further down on the page (I know I didn't). But since I'm always running late on Sundays and since a lot of members are on vacation, I told myself I'd go back to the site after the entries here started go up. There's a lot up there (this isn't a slow news Sunday) so, besides what we're about to highlight, try to make a point to check out BuzzFlash today.
Charlie e-mailed BuzzFlash's GOP Hypocrite of the Week. Here's the opening:
Welcome back to the BuzzFlash.com GOP Hypocrite of the Week.
As we mentioned a few honorees ago, BuzzFlash just can't keep up with the revelations of Republican sexual perversity. It's kind of brazenly breathtaking to see so many phonies indulge in such public affirmations of Puritanism and such private acts of hedonism.
Who is it? Click the link to find out.
Kara e-mailed, from BuzzFlash, Dr. Teresa Whitehurst's "A Meditation on Killing First and Asking Questions Later:"
After all the human carnage that’s gone on in Afghanistan and Iraq, I suppose it’s not too important to many Americans that our dog lovers in uniform have been forced to "go through towns shooting dogs" because they’re "suspected of carrying rabies." A young soldier, 19 years old, reported this sad assignment to my daughter a month or so ago, but quickly added, "I don’t want to talk about it."
Some will leap to defend whatever the US military deems necessary: "Well of course they have to shoot rabid dogs. They spread disease and when our boys kill them, it’s for the good of the Iraqi people." But most won’t even bother. After over 100,000 civilians and 1,600 US soldiers have died (not to mention the staggering numbers of permanently wounded and maimed Americans and Iraqis), what do dogs matter?
Cedric e-mailed Gloria R. Lalumia's "WORLD MEDIA WATCH FOR MAY 27, 2005" from BuzzFlash, here's an excerpt:
REMAKING CENTRAL ASIA
By Ramtanu Maitra
Most major media outlets have spelled out with a profusion of details the "exact" events that led to the death of what some claim to have been hundreds of people in the eastern Uzbekistan town of Andijan on May 13. Led by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, the world media condemned much-maligned Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov for yet another bloody and ruthless suppression of "public dissent". Yet, all the details so far provided do not explain who the real players were or their end objectives.
It is certain, however, that the puzzle cannot be solved unless the London factor is understood. The answers lie in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Liverpool. The old British colonial establishment, with former intelligence officer Bernard Lewis as its mentor, appears to have set in motion a series of events that will bring endless bloodshed to Central Asia. London's objective would appear to be to keep both China and Russia under an open-ended threat. At this point, there is no one who can better serve this "Lewis Doctrine" than Muslims nurtured in Britain - the Hizbut-Tehrir (HT).
Ben e-mailed to note Bill Scher's Friday entry at Liberal Oasis:
Liberal Oasis is not keen on playing the sourpuss all week, but the “non-filibuster filibuster” that Dems laid on the Bolton nomination is nothing to get excited about.
Dems are contending it’s not really a filibuster because they aren’t extending debate in order to directly kill the nomination.
Only to delay a vote until the State Dept. coughs up info that the Senate deserves to review before a vote.
The gambit of course is that with delay comes hope that they can uncover damning evidence that would shake loose a few more uneasy Republicans and defeat Bolton outright.
Anything is possible, but the farce of the Foreign Relations Cmte vote -- which allowed the nomination to go to the full Senate without majority support -- should have taught Dems the lesson.
Elaine e-mailed to note CounterRecruiter's "37 Military Recruiters Go AWOL:"
"But the focus at the Defense Department has been on the excesses of desperate recruiters, 37 of whom reflected their frustration in trying to meet quotas by going AWOL over the last 2-1/2 years. The official response was a 24-hour stand-down in recruiting to review proper procedures. It also has been proposed that enlistments, now usually three to four years with a minimum of 24 months, be cut to 15 months."
Zach e-mailed to note David Sirota's "POLL: On Trade, Follow Lou Dobbs not Tom Friedman:"
Democrats are still engaged in a debate about whether to continue embracing Clinton-style corporate-written "free" trade deals, or whether to start putting America's middle-class first. If there was any debate about where the right place to go politically is, a new poll puts it to rest.Check out page 32 of this new Democracy Corps poll.
It pits the New York Times' Tom Friedman's "free" trade views up against CNN's Lou Dobbs' views on fair trade - and it shows Dobbs views destroy Friedman's in the public's mind. (Note to those of you who take issue with Dobbs on immigration, this is only on trade policy - not on anything else).
Sadly, the former Clintonites/Beltway insiders who put together this poll (some of whom like Stan Greenberg I do really admire) couldn't prevent their own biases from trying to skew the result: they could only bring themselves to write a headline that said a huge 54%-40% gap meant that "Lou Dobbs is ahead of Tom Friedman FOR NOW."
Okay, that covers things that members wanted highlighted. Isaiah's The World Today Just Nuts will go up immediately after this (my apologies for the delay).
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
[Note: This post has been corrected to fix the link to BuzzFlash's GOP Hypocrite of the Week. Thanks to Shirley for catching that.]
