Author: StrayRoots

Crossposted from Dameocrat Blog

Hey Democrats!  Now that we know Matalin is working for Cheney, please don’t take campaign advise from this man!

Arianna rightly roughs up Carville!

Why the Dems Need James Carville to Take a Long, Long Vacation:
That’s all in the past. <span style=”font-weight:bold;”>Now, as one of Dick Cheney’s most trusted first-term advisors, one of eight founding members of the White House Iraq Group,</span&gt a witness in front of the Plamegate grand jury, and a close friend of Scooter Libby (“The man you pray you get seated next to at a dinner party,” she recently cooed), Matalin is a central player in all this.

“And it has hopelessly handcuffed Carville. Check out this exchange from his appearance on The Situation Room this week:

   BLITZER: Should the vice president hold a news conference or grant an interview and answer the tough questions that are being asked out there?

    CARVILLE: I’ve got a better idea. Why doesn’t the president get out and have one? Harry Truman didn’t say the buck stops with the Vice President. The buck stops with the President.

    [snip]

    I think the first step is not the Vice President — [it’s] the President of the United States standing up, answering to the American people, answering people’s questions… The Vice nothing. There aren’t no Vices around here. There’s one man in charge of this country and that is George W. Bush.”

“The Vice nothing”? “There are no Vices around here”? The buck doesn’t stop with the Vice President? Are you kidding me? The Vice President’s office is Ground Zero on Plamegate — and on the Bush administration’s push for war. It was Cheney who regularly stormed over to the CIA, knocking heads and twisting arms to get the intel he wanted. It was Cheney who set the Plamegate ball rolling by demanding info on the bogus claims of a Niger/Iraq uranium connection. It was Cheney who led the media charge in selling the war with his unwavering claims that Saddam had the ability to “subject the United States…to nuclear blackmail.” It was Cheney who helped foster the bogus impression that there was an al-Qaeda/Saddam connection — continuing to tout the “Atta met with Saddam’s reps in Prague” story long after it had been shot down by the FBI. It was Cheney’s office that opened its arms to Chalabi after the CIA soured on him. It was “Cheney’s Cheney,” Scooter Libby, who wrote the original draft of Colin Powell’s shameful UN speech. And it was Cheney’s office that took the lead in the administration’s efforts to discredit Joe Wilson and his wife.

Memo to Carville: If you can’t talk about Dick Cheney, then you can’t talk about Plamegate. Or about the war — and the lies and deceptions the administration used to sell it to the American people. And if you can’t talk about Plamegate and the war, you should not be talking at all from the Democratic side of the aisle.

Arianna piles on with this quote!

Carville: I think Democrats have a great opportunity to show that they’re going to stand up for the interests of working people, going to stand up for the interests of middle-class people and get away from the machine gun lobby and the anti-Family Medical Leave and all of these other decisions here.

Were in the middle of the Plame investigation, the President has a 35% approval rating and he still wants to focus on domestic issues? Come on! He is clearly too compromised to advise Democrats on this matter.  Frankly he was during the Kerry campaign as well.

Crossposted from Dameocrat Blog

Are the Democrats finally getting feisty?  Today Senator Frank Lautenberg (D)New Jersey, introduced an amemendment to change the name of the Republican “Deficit Reduction and Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 2005” to the “Moral Disaster of Monumental Proportion Reconciliation Act”!

The post quotes him as saying,

“‘Let’s call this bill what it is — a moral disaster,’ explained Lautenberg. ‘This bill would close the door of opportunity and cut critical services to the poor, elderly, sick and hungry.’

Senators had yet to vote on the amendment as of this post, but given the Republican majority in the Senate the name change seems to have little chance of passage.

The overall bill being debated in the Senate is aimed at making cuts in spending on entitlement programs in order to offset the massive federal costs incurred for the clean-up of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita along the Gulf Coast. Democrats have massed in opposition to the cuts, which they insist disproportionately disadvantage the nation’s poorest and most infirm citizens.”

 I really was shocked at the level of gall it would take to make the poor pay for this.  However the Democrats have let other things like this slide, so I no longer expect anything from them.

Crossposted from Dameocrat Blog

I guess Joe isn’t reading the polls!

SEN. JOE BIDEN, D-Del., made some interesting comments during his Manchester stop Tuesday night. He said too many Democrats were elitist and even unpatriotic, and he blamed them for helping Republicans paint the entire party as out of touch with America.

Biden noted that some Democrats had even questioned why he wore an American flag pin on his lapel.

The senator has been refreshingly honest about his run for the Democratic nomination for President in 2008. Further honest comments like those he made Tuesday night might hurt his chances within a party lurching increasingly to the left. But the Democrats need to hear them.

The anti-American left has seriously damaged the party, and unless more high-profile Democrats take them on, theirs will continue to be the minority party in America.  

I think he made the part about the American flag pin up!

According to the latest polls Bush’s approval rating is at 35%.  His favorability rating is 33%.  If the Democratic party nominates him or someone like him it is truly dead, dead dead!

Crossposted from Dameocrat Blog

I know I am on everyones shit list because I dislike kos, but I do cover issues hardly anyone else gives a shit about. Here is just one issue that I think the Democrats should prioritize that is absolutely not on the kossack or mainstream Democratic agenda.  For years the republicans have been able to undercut social programs by portraying the poor as morally inferior. They have even gotten mainstream economics departments at Universities to put out this kind of stuff.  The mainstream news often reports these kinds of “spun” statistics without recongnizing that they are really carefully disguised op/eds, rather than careful research.
ABC News: Church-going boosts economic well-being: study:

“‘Doubling the frequency of attendance leads to a 9.1 percent increase in household income, or a rise of 5.5 percent as a fraction of the poverty scale,’ Jonathan Gruber of the economics department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote in his study.

‘Those with more faith may be less ‘stressed out’ about daily problems that impede success in the labor market and the marriage market, and therefore are more successful,’ Gruber wrote in the study, which was released by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Top Stories

Could it be the opposite is true?  Maybe a 9.1 percent increase in household income, or a rise of 5.5 percent as a fraction of the poverty scale actually leads to a doubling of church attendence. Maybe less stress in one job and marriage and more personal success also leads to more church attendence.

Living in a community with complementary ethnic groups that share the same religion increases the frequency of going to a house of worship, he said in the paper titled ‘Religious Market Structure, Religious Participation, and Outcomes: Is Religion Good for You?’

According to this study you also need to strenuously avoid contact with other religious and ethnic groups to be successful, particularly if you are white.

Such visits correlate to higher levels of education and income, lower levels of welfare receipt and disability, higher levels of marriage and lower levels of divorce, the study said.”

Could it be that higher levels of education and income, more wealth and better health, not to mention better marriages also lead to more church attendence?

This appears to be one of those “the rich are morally superior to the poor spin jobs” that often masks itself as hard science. It is sad MIT is subsidizing it.

Crossposted from Dameocrat Blog

No rapes have been reported to the police.  Neither have any shootings at helicopters.

Fear Exceeded Crime’s Reality in New Orleans – New York Times: “In an interview last week with The New York Times, Superintendent Compass said that some of his most shocking statements turned out to be untrue. Asked about reports of rapes and murders, he said: ‘We have no official reports to document any murder. Not one official report of rape or sexual assault.’

On Sept. 4, however, he was quoted in The Times about conditions at the convention center, saying: ‘The tourists are walking around there, and as soon as these individuals see them, they’re being preyed upon. They are beating, they are raping them in the streets.’

Those comments, Superintendent Compass now says, were based on secondhand reports. The tourists ‘were walking with their suitcases, and they would have their clothes and things taken,’ he said last week. ‘No rapes that we can quantify.’

Rumors Affected Response

A full chronicle of the week’s crimes, actual and reported, may never be possible because so many basic functions of government ceased early in the week, including most public safety record-keeping. The city’s 911 operators left their phones when water began to rise around their building.”

I am betting crony controlled fema spread them to cover their asses. Afterall fema would constantly announce on cnn it was suspending operations based on these reports.

I am reposting this from and old post I posted at Kos back before the tu diary police went on jihad against antidlc posters and banned me.

DLC Corporate not Moderate!
by NoAlternative [Subscribe]
Fri Nov 19th, 2004 at 13:05:20 PDT

This is also one of the reasons I don’t understand Kos’s enthusiam for Rosenberg after Dean.  Rosenberg has duller fangs then the other dlcers, but he is still dlc.

Rosenberg: “”We’re trying to raise money to help them lessen their reliance on traditional interest groups in the Democratic Party.”

SNIP…”At a time when the public thinks big business has too much influence in Washington, the DLC’s mission is to increase the influence of business in the Democratic Party. Or as Simon Rosenberg, head of the DLC’s corporate-funded political action committee, the New Democrat Network, put it, “We’re trying to raise money to help them lessen their reliance on traditional interest groups in the Democratic Party.” But today, two-thirds of the public says big business already has too much influence in Washington. By 50 to 37 percent, Americans say Bush favors the interests of big corporations over ordinary working people. By 49 to 37 percent, they say Democrats favor ordinary working people. That advantage would disappear if the DLC has its way….”

Corporate scandals:
SNIP..” New Dems joined with Republicans in diluting efforts to clean up the current mess. New Dems in the House offered bipartisan support for the Republican accounting reform bill that was certified as harmless by the accountants’ lobby. Before the WorldCom revelations, when it looked like reform was going to be bottled up in the Senate, Lieberman and DLC head Al From launched a PR drive to warn Democrats against being antibusiness and doing too much….”

SNIP…”. The DLC champions privatization of Social Security as a centerpiece of its program for the new century. Or in DLC speak, as Will Marshall, one of its founders, puts it, “using choice and competition to advance…the big social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare.” The DLC provides bipartisan support for a Bush folly that, as Senator Tom Daschle says, would turn Social Security from a guarantee into a gamble….”

I think ndn apparent break with them is just an attempt at cutting the dlc’s losses.  I think we should all be concerned at where Kos is headed, because of his support of NDN.  I think that is why those of us who really want a break should start investing in booman instead of Kos.

Also look at where the diary police chose to start attacking me.  Yep it was on my criticism of the dlc.

Remember Kos has given these people absolute authority to ban us so he must approve of this behavior, or at least not care very much what they do to us.

Crossposted from Dameocrat Blog

Tom Hayden hits the nail on the head about Bush in the neocons.

Why the US Is Supporting Civil War: “There’s a small practical problem with this revised vision. It is likely to intensify the war on two levels: Iraqis against the Americans and Iraqis against each other. I don’t have a particular philosophical preference for centralized government, but the alternative in Iraq is a devolution to warring ethnic and religious fiefdoms under the control of the international market. Yoo, Brooks and Galbraith are silent on this untidy aspect of their scenario, with Yoo even reminding Americans that we had to go through the ‘fiery experience’ of civil war before becoming a nation. Leaving aside the fact that Americans threw the British out by force, that’s a macabre future for Iraqis who were promised ‘liberation.’ Since the civil war will not be won militarily, the Administration will argue that the occupation must be permanent.

If this sounds mad, manipulative or both, what does it reveal about US intentions in Iraq?

It suggests that the American purpose has been to destroy Iraqi nationalism, as  in the previous Baathist state and the continued de-Baathification policies.  

It suggests that our ‘best and brightest’ want to weaken any future possibility of a strong Iraqi state with control of its own enterprises and resources.

It suggests that the US has chosen to ally itself with Islamic fundamentalism rather than a secular state with a centralized government.

It suggests that civil war against the Sunnis and any other ‘diehards’ is the US preference rather than a political settlement that brings the nationalist resistance, including the Sunnis, into negotiations rather than war.

This is the same strategy the Israelis chose decades ago when they directly and indirectly supported the Islamic religious groupings as preferable to the secular and ‘Marxist’ Palestinian Liberation Organization [PLO] two decades ago. That strategy contributed directly to the creation of Hezbollah and suicide bombers.

It is the same strategy that led the US to support the mujahadeen, the embryonic Al Qaeda, against the secular, pro-Russian Afghan government. In 1998, two years before 9/11, Zbigiew Brzezinski flippantly dismissed critics of the policy this way:

    Question: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?

    Answer: What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?

    Question: ‘Some agitated Muslims’? But it has been said that repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today…

    Answer: Nonsense… [Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, Jan. 15-21, 1998]

The US opposes independent nationalism from Iraq to Venezuela. It prefers to weaken independent states to diminish their military potential in either the Middle East or Latin America, and to break down what are described as ‘protectionist’ barriers to the ‘free trade’ model of Halliburton or Wal-Mart.

In seeking to impose both Pentagon dominance and a neo-liberal economic model on the world, the US is prepared to accept alliances with religious forces that insist on strict censorship and punishment of freedom of association and belief. For Bush and the neo-conservatives, it seems, freedom for American investors can’t wait, but women – their rights ‘are not critical to the evolution of democracy.'”

Freedom for Investers: This is why Sheehan’s son died!

Crossposted from Dameocrat Blog

Disengagement was all a show folks. They just did it to make the likelyhood of leaving the West Bank look impossible to the Israeli majority.

AlterNet: A Different Take on Disengagement: “If Ariel Sharon had been willing to negotiate a genuine peace agreement with the Palestinians in which Israel withdrew to the 1967 border (with slight border modifications along the lines suggested by Yossi Beilin in the Geneva Accord of 2003), one part of that agreement could have allowed all settlers to stay in their homes in Gaza and the West Bank as long as they agreed to be law-abiding citizens of the Palestinian state that would be governing that area. If they were not willing to give up their Israeli citizenship and live in peace with their neighbors, they could voluntarily leave their homes and return to Israel. That is the same choice that Arabs faced once Israel was established in a land that they once governed. It should have been the choice offered to Israeli settlers as well.

There never had to be the horrible scene of people being dragged from their homes.

So why did it happen?  Because Ariel Sharon’s entire plan — as explained to the Israeli public by his assistant, Dov Weisglass — was to sacrifice the settlers of Gaza precisely in order to have the painful images that dominated the media, so that Sharon could argue ‘Of course no one can ask us to do this kind of thing to the 300,000 settlers in the West Bank, given the pain everyone has seen us go through in Gaza.’

As Sharon’s aides tried to tell the settlers, the Disengagement was intended to preserve the Occupation, not undermine it. And so, Sharon is moving ahead to finish construction of the Separation Wall and cut off from the West Bank the 150,000 Palestinians living in East Jerusalem (not to mention many other Palestinians living in proximity to the Wall), expropriate more and more Palestinian land, and ‘create facts’ on the ground that will be hard to change.

There are some who celebrate this Gaza withdrawal as the first step in the process of dismantling settlements. Rabbi Lerner asks them the following: ‘At what point, how many years from now, while the Occupation continues of much of the West Bank, will you acknowledge that this was simply another part of the scheme that Sharon has–to hold on to close to 50 percent of the West Bank while offering Palestinians a state that will be neither economically nor politically viable, a state that, when they refuse it, or when they accept it and then ask for more, will be used as ‘proof’ that nothing will ever satisfy them?’ So, Rabbi Lerner argues, we should understand that all the pain was part of an elaborate ruse–and though the immediate victims are the Gaza settlers, the real victims are all the peoples of Israel and Palestine who will have to endure the ongoing suffering that the continuation of the Occupation guarantees.”

The only problem for Sharon is that it isn’t working. Most of the Israeli public supports more disengagement from the West Bank settlements. They were also offended by the behavior of the settlers, because of the way they exploited their kids and because of their harassment of the soldiers.

Crossposted from Dameocrat Blog

Britain rebels against our hired asshole at the UN John Bolton. As documented in yesterdays diary he also intends to derail the nuclear non proliferation treaty and work to stop global warming.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Britain heads for clash with US: “A draft of that plan had included a review of progress on the UN’s millennium development goals – poverty eradication targets set in 2000 for completion by 2015 – and the introduction of reforms aimed at repairing the damage done to the UN’s reputation by Iraq, Rwanda and the Balkans.

But it was revealed this week that Mr Bush’s new ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, was seeking 750 changes to the 36-page draft plan to be presented to a special summit in New York on September 14 to 16. Mr Bolton’s amendments, if successful, would leave the plan in tatter……

The concern in British and other international circles is that the American objections, if adopted, would severely undermine the UN summit, the biggest-ever gathering of world leaders……

A source close to the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan said it was too early to declare the UN plan dead. “Bolton wants to knock down the plan and start from scratch,” the source said. “He will find that his opinions are not shared by most of the rest of the world.”

The president of the UN general assembly, Jean Ping from the Gambia, has been working on the draft, covering issues of poverty, climate change, genocide, small arms, the creation of a permanent UN peacekeeping capability and reform of the UN management structure, for the past year………

It is ironic he would have the gall to do this, since he is undoubtedly one of the cast of characters that lied us into the war.

Crossposted from Dameocrat Blog

News of our hired asshole at the UN John Bolton!

U.S. Wants Changes In U.N. Agreement: “The United States has only recently introduced more than 750 amendments that would eliminate new pledges of foreign aid to impoverished nations, scrap provisions that call for action to halt climate change and urge nuclear powers to make greater progress in dismantling their nuclear arms. At the same time, the administration is urging members of the United Nations to strengthen language in the 29-page document that would underscore the importance of taking tougher action against terrorism, promoting human rights and democracy, and halting the spread of the world’s deadliest weapons……….

The proposed changes, submitted by U.S. Ambassador John R. Bolton, touch on virtually every aspect of U.N. affairs and provide a detailed look at U.S. concerns about the world body’s future. They underscore U.S. efforts to impose greater oversight of U.N. spending and to eliminate any reference to the International Criminal Court. The administration also opposes language that urges the five permanent members of the Security Council not to cast vetoes to block action to halt genocide, war crimes or ethnic cleansing.

These changes are so hypocritical. Where to start. For one thing you can’t seriously want to halt the spread of WMD then halt provisions that call for greater progress to be made dismantling nukes. If you are serious about tackling genocide, why in the world would you want to kill the ICC? They were the one that tried Milosevic.  This is all meant to support American Unilateralism and exceptionalism.

The Bush adminstration neoconservatives hate the ICC because it might take a look at Abu Ghraib for instance, and because it has taken issue with the wall and the settlements in Israel.    They also want to halt the dismantlement nuclear weapons because they are trying to rebuild America’s arsenal. In fact they are testing them again after Kennedy banned nuclear testing. In this spirit they have rejected the nuclear non proliferation treaty. This is one of the reasons we have no leverage over the Iranians, who have signed it. Putting the millenium goals, foreign aid to poor countries, and the global warming issue on hold is just a way to be venial and extra stupid, arrogant and assholish. Neocons consider meaness a virtue. That is what unilaterism is in essence, being an asshole and getting away with it.

Bolton would have been refused the position at the UN if this were a sane and responsible administration. He is one of the guys that lied us into the Iraq war.