the bastards' last stand

I am admittedly a lazy poster. It's not that I lack for worthy subject matter. If anything I'm overwhelmed by the depth and breadth of subject matter, as well as by the still inescapable feeling that the fuckers are trying to break us. I have been wanting to go back to last week's press conference and Bush's answer to Helen Thomas' question of why he wanted to go into Iraq. His answer was so ridiculously false and convoluted as to not be an answer. Helen later said what she, and I, and many others believe which is that 9/11 was the excuse and not the reason. The evidence has been there for years. As Helen mentions to Wolf Blitzer, Iraq had been on the administration's radar from the beginning. Several of the war architects belonged The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) which had been advocating for military action in Iraq for years . Then there's the "new" Downing Street Memo. The New York Times finally published a front page sto...

From yesterdays Bush press conference we get this piece of magnificence: QUESTION (Helen Thomas): I’d like to ask you, Mr. President — your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is: Why did you really want to go to war? From the moment you stepped into the White House, your Cabinet officers, former Cabinet officers, intelligence people and so forth — but what’s your real reason? You have said it wasn’t oil, the quest for oil. It hasn’t been Israel or anything else. What was it? Of course the president skirted the truth like a mine field. It's a shame he's such a pathetic public speaker. Actually it's kinda funny watching him try to tie 9/11, al qaeda, saddam, and afghanistan together without repeating any of the old discredited lies, which he of course he never said . As a result we get things fr...

A U.S. soldier who raped a Nigerian woman in Italy was given a lighter sentence because the court deemed his tour of duty in Iraq had made him less sensitive to the suffering of others. According to an Italian court document obtained by Reuters on Tuesday, James Michael Brown, a 27-year-old paratrooper from Oregon stationed in northern Italy, was sentenced to five years and eight months for rape in February 2004. Brown beat and handcuffed the woman, a Nigerian resident in the town of Vicenza. He raped her vaginally and anally and left her to wander the streets naked in search of help. The crime would have earned him an eight-year sentence, but the judges reduced the penalty due to the "extenuating circumstances'' of the psychological effects of Brown's year of service in Iraq, the document said. Leaving aside my thoughts that the leniency had as much to do with the victim's race as anything, this news brief in the NY Times chilled me. It leads me to w...

I can't escape the feeling that despite all of the families' grief, our military deaths mean little more to the president than the quarterly profit losses he grew used to hearing about in every business he ran into the ground. And like in those businesses, ultimately the loss is someone else's problem. I have been intermittently following the various discussions on the left for and against the pursuit of articles of impeachment. I think that I had basically fallen on the against side, agreeing with several pundits that it would be a distraction from the fall elections. After today I'm leaning the other way. I spent the day indoors, avoiding the snow and slush to curl up with a little on-line news. I read excerpts from an article by Harper's editor Lewis H. Lapham, The Case for Impeachment . He wrote it in response to the report from John Conyer's committee investigating the lead up to war. In the closing paragraph he says, Before reading the report, I w...