Children of UK service personnel killed in action would be offered university scholarships under the Tories, shadow chancellor George Osborne has pledged.
The £8,210 grant would pay course fees and £5,000 a year towards living costs, he told the News of the World.
A further education scholarship would also cover college fees and costs when not covered by other entitlements.
The above is from BBC News' "Tories plan scholarships for children of fallen troops." The Tories aren't proposing that because they're wonderful and caring people. They're a political party. (A conservative one.) Elections are coming up. They want votes. They propose the above because they want votes. And we're emphasizing the above to underscore how pathetic the 'left' is in the US.
In 2008, Jeremy Scahill insisted, after year another Blackwater piece in The Nation magazine, that Democratic Party presidential candidates -- at that point, just Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- needed to make a break from Blackwater. Shortly
after the article appears, within 24 hours, Hillary makes the sort of pledge Jeremy's calling for.
What happened next explains how pathetic the left has become and why the country's in so damn much trouble.
Having seen pressure move a candidate (at least to words), the thing to do was to apply further pressure. And applause for Hillary could have forced Barack to make a similar pledge.
Smart people who want things from politicians learn the answer is to play one politician off another, not to be played by politicians. The clerical pool trying to 'lead' the left contained no smart -- or even average -- people.
So Jeremy, who wanted this sort of pledge, now insisted Hillary was just making the pledge because of his article (uh, wasn't that point of the article) and that although Barack wouldn't make the same promise, that was okay.
Jeremy forgot to tell readers (as well as Democracy Now viewers) that he was in the midst of a (non-sexual) seduction by Samantha Power, then Barack's chief foreign policy adviser and (everyone just knew) the next Secretary of State. Jeremy could be tight with the next Colin Powell!!!!!
Proximity made him giddy. Lack of intelligence made him s**ty.
In that moment, when Barack refused to make the same pledge Hillary was making, you saw how pathetic the left had become. The 'feet to the fire' cry proved to be as empty words as Barack's withdrawal of one brigade a month immediately after being sworn in.
There's so much more to a democracy than voting and electoral process but if you're going to stake your name and reputation on merely the electoral process, than you might do well to learn how to play the game and all Panhandle Media demonstrated in 2008 was that they didn't have a damn clue.
They repeatedly covered and lied (John Nichols most famously on NAFTA) for Barack Obama. When it was time for the general election they were too busy pledging unconditional love to Barack to bother to leverage any actions from him. By July 2008, they were too busy doing hit jobs on John McCain.
If you're only means of 'power' is voting, you damn well don't throw in the towel on demands weeks before an election.
But that's what they did. Now they're not happy with the War Hawk Corporatist they help install in the White House and they want to last out at others but which of the lazy asses, which of the simple minded plans to step forward and take accountability?
With all of our lives, they wanted to play high stake poker but they wanted to show their hand before the first bid was made. And that's how the left loses.
And that's why we can't afford them. If they (Norman Solomon, John Nichols, Jeremy Scahill, Amy Goodman, Laura Flanders, etc.) can't get accountable for what they did, they're too sick to help us. If they can't take accountability, they will repeat the same actions in 2012. We can't afford them.
They destroyed the peace movement, they turned it into a get-out-the-vote organ. And we can't let them do that again. They includes Naomi Klein who likes to ride her high horse after elections and really hopes no one notices the way she's all about electoral politics herself. Klein and Scahill are very lucky most of their 2008 political moments appeared off camera or on the Real News Network (which, considering viewership, is basically the same thing).
In England, voters are going to do what they're going to do. If they're smart they will applaud the Tories' proposal and demand that the Labour Party (and the Liberal Democrats) make similar offers. They will pit one party against the other and demand that the parties compete for their votes. In the US, 'leaders' sold out the left before the primaries were over.
Lauren notes Jalal Ghazi's "Cancer - The Deadly Legacy Of The Invasion Of Iraq" (CounterCurrents):
Forget about oil, occupation, terrorism or even Al Qaeda. The real hazard for Iraqis these days is cancer.
Cancer is spreading like wildfire in Iraq. Thousands of infants are being born with deformities. Doctors say they are struggling to cope with the rise of cancer and birth defects, especially in cities subjected to heavy American and British bombardment.
Cancer is spreading like wildfire in Iraq. Thousands of infants are being born with deformities. Doctors say they are struggling to cope with the rise of cancer and birth defects, especially in cities subjected to heavy American and British bombardment.
Here are a few examples. In Falluja, which was heavily bombarded by the US in 2004, as many as 25% of new- born infants have serious abnormalities, including congenital anomalies, brain tumors, and neural tube defects in the spinal cord.
The cancer rate in the province of Babil, south of Baghdad has risen from 500 diagnosed cases in 2004 to 9,082 in 2009 according to Al Jazeera English.
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
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