Al-Qaeda In Iraq Bush’s Creation

Thursday, July 5th, 2007 by RLR

From The Niagara Falls Reporter
By Bill Gallagher

bush 804President George W. Bush’s political capital is about as low as it can go, with only dead-end Bushists clinging to his failed regime. The erosion of support, however, can actually make the madman even more isolated from reality, arrogant and impetuous.

The final 18 months of his presidency will be an increasingly dangerous time for the world. Bush is wrapping himself in his messianic blanket, still bound to convince the infidels at home and abroad that he is a gifted visionary who can reshape the Middle East.

Vice President Dick Cheney makes Dr. Strangelove seem like Gandhi. Cheney operates above the Congress, the Constitution, the law and human decency — at times, above the presidency. He does as he pleases and is answerable to no one.

Bush is not nearly clever enough to sort through or keep up with Cheney’s Machiavellian machinations. The president is so lazy and incurious, he’s more than willing to let Cheney do his dirty work. Whether it is approving torture, illegal wiretapping, concentration camps and kidnappings, or coddling corporate polluters, Cheney is ready to nod OK.

The poll numbers are encouraging, as Americans see through the lies and conclude — tragically, too late — what a mess we are in. The percentage of Americans who believe the war in Iraq was a mistake is at an all-time high, as is the percentage of those who say continued U.S. military action there is not morally justified.

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Justice Denied

Thursday, July 5th, 2007 by RLR

From The NY Times
Editorial

In the 1960s, Chief Justice Earl Warren presided over a Supreme Court that interpreted the Constitution in ways that protected the powerless — racial and religious minorities, consumers, students and criminal defendants. At the end of its first full term, Chief Justice John Roberts’s court is emerging as the Warren court’s mirror image. Time and again the court has ruled, almost always 5-4, in favor of corporations and powerful interests while slamming the courthouse door on individuals and ideals that truly need the court’s shelter.

President Bush created this radical new court with two appointments in quick succession: Mr. Roberts to replace Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Samuel Alito to replace the far less conservative Sandra Day O’Connor.

The Roberts court’s resulting sharp shift to the right began to be strongly felt in this term. It was on display, most prominently, in the school desegregation ruling last week. The Warren court, and even the Rehnquist court of two years ago, would have upheld the integration plans that Seattle and Louisville, Ky., voluntarily adopted. But the Roberts court, on a 5-4 vote, struck them down, choosing to see the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause — which was adopted for the express purpose of integrating blacks more fully into society — as a tool for protecting white students from integration.

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Above The Law, In All But Name

Thursday, July 5th, 2007 by RLR

From The Boston Globe
Editorial

bush1In Commuting the 30-month jail sentence of convicted perjurer I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, President Bush did not technically place himself above the law, since presidential commutations are clearly legal. What he did was to place his administration above accountability, and not for the first time. From the hundreds of signing statements on new laws to his refusal to comply with congressional investigations of the US attorneys’ purge and the warrantless wiretapping of US citizens, Bush has acted as though the nation had its chance to hold him accountable, in the 2004 election — and chose not to.

As long as Congress remained in Republican hands, there were few means by which the public could challenge administration decisions in leading the nation to war in Iraq or in taking extreme measures in confronting terrorism. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson’s name, which led to the perjury charges against Libby, was one of those opportunities for holding the administration to account.

The public disclosure of Plame Wilson’s identity turned out to have been incidental to the attempt to discredit her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former US diplomat. In a now-famous New York Times op-ed piece, Wilson asserted that the administration had ignored information undercutting its insinuation that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons. The case of Libby, formerly the top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, demonstrated the lengths the administration would go to silence critics.

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Abandoning The Promise

Thursday, July 5th, 2007 by RLR

From The Baltimore Sun
By Erwin Chemerinsky and Charles Clotfelter

American public schools are becoming increasingly separate and unequal, and last week’s Supreme Court decision invalidating desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., will hasten this process.

Three-quarters of African-American and Latino schoolchildren attend predominantly minority schools, and white children are even more likely to attend racially isolated schools.

School districts across the country have adopted plans to decrease segregation, and many of these plans are now vulnerable to legal challenge.

The truth is that most of the steam had already been taken out of federal efforts to create racially integrated schools. This decision is merely an explicit and emphatic end to court-sanctioned actions to lessen racial segregation in public schools.

This decision is in effect the third step in the Supreme Court’s abandonment of the apparent promise of Brown v. Board of Education.

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Tom the Dancing Bug

Thursday, July 5th, 2007 by RLR

From Salon
By Ruben Bolling

tomdancingbugCheck out this very funny comic from Tom The Dancing Bug

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High Court Takes Giant Steps Backward

Thursday, July 5th, 2007 by RLR

From The Seattle PI
By Helen Thomas

supremecourt3The new Supreme Court is more conservative than it has been in decades. It’s also meaner.

It is a dream come true for Republican presidencies dating back to the “strict constructionist” court aspirations of President Nixon and now made possible by the conservative George W. Bush.

Before closing down for the summer last month, the high court tossed out a flurry of decisions that overturned or reinterpreted long-standing liberal precedents.

The court under Chief Justice John Roberts seems intent on rolling back advances in race and gender relations that have helped America achieve a more equal and humane society.

The 5-4 decisions of the conservative court dealt with race, abortion, free speech, church-state relations and a host of other issues. They also showed a pro-business and anti-consumer slant.

The majority justices are running counter to the current trend against right-wing ideologues and a power-grabbing unilateral presidency.

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The Guns of August?

Thursday, July 5th, 2007 by RLR

From The LA Times
Editorial

A Favorite Washington fantasy this summer is that clever U.S. diplomacy might somehow succeed in splitting Syria from its current patron, Iran. The dream is a bipartisan indulgence — and probably quixotic. Instead, the United States and its allies would do better to turn quickly to the urgent matter of preventing war between Syria and Israel.

War fears have been fanned by a notable Syrian arms buildup. Damascus has purchased surface-to-surface missiles, antitank weapons and sophisticated air-defense systems. It is also believed to have received Iranian funds to pay Russia for missiles and a reported $1-billion purchase of five advanced MIG-31E fighter jets. Syria denies Israeli reports that it is rearming Hezbollah, whose weapons stores were depleted during its war with Israel last summer. But a recent report to the U.N. Security Council warned that poor security along the Syrian-Lebanese border allows arms smuggling to Hezbollah to continue.

Even more ominously, Syria has hinted that if Israel continues to spurn its offers to restart peace talks on the return of the Golan Heights, perhaps a war to retake the Golan might be its only option. The Bush administration has been opposed to Israeli-Syrian peace talks, which it sees as undermining its campaign to isolate and punish Syria. Israelis are divided on the matter, but so far their government has opted not to pursue talks — perhaps using U.S. resistance as a convenient excuse.

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When the ‘Bleed-Out’ Begins

Thursday, July 5th, 2007 by RLR

From The Washington Post
By David Ignatius

PH2005032604402How would America react to a future terrorist attack? Would the country come together to combat its adversaries or would it pull farther apart?

Perhaps we will never have to confront the question, you say. Perhaps our good luck will hold, or our intelligence will detect all the plots and plotters, or the terrorists will conclude that America is so divided anyway, why do anything that might unite the country? Maybe things will turn out that way, but a prudent person wouldn’t bet on it.

The British car bomb plots uncovered last week remind us of our vulnerability to terrorist attack, wherever we live. Muslims have mostly been killing other Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that imploding jihad won’t continue forever. What’s ahead is a phenomenon that an intelligence official described several years ago as “bleed-out,” in which the suicide bombers of Baghdad look outward for targets — to Europe and America.

A chilling measure of Muslim anger is that several of the suspected bomb plotters arrested by the British are doctors. What kind of rage would lead a physician trained in the healing arts to pack together nails, explosives and propane gas in a mix that would shatter bones and rip apart flesh? This is a revolt of the privileged, the uprooted, the disconnected. It speaks of self-mutilation as much as mayhem against others.

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Why Do We Hate Them?

Thursday, July 5th, 2007 by RLR

From Information Clearing House
By Gilad Atzmon

londonattackWhen I came over to Britain some thirteen years ago, I found a very tolerant place. I was amazed to see so many people of so many colours, not just living together in peace, but living in full harmony. At Essex University, the institute where I was doing my postgraduate studies, everyone was enthusiastic about post-colonialism. The Brits, so it seemed to me at the time, were repenting over their embarrassing colonial past. I was mildly impressed but not totally overwhelmed. At the end of the day, it isn’t that difficult to denounce your grandfather’s crimes.

I was amazed to see Turks and Cypriots running grocery shops side by side in Green Lane. My first roommate was a Palestinian M.A. student from Beit Sahour, it all felt natural. It didn’t take long before I fell in love with the town and decided to make it into my permanent home.

At the time, Britain was very different from the place I came from. In my homeland the human landscape was officially reduced into two types. In a manner of crude binary opposition there was always a clear division between the ‘Good’ and the ‘Bad’, the ‘us’ and the ‘them’, the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ or just the ‘Jews’ and the ‘Arabs’. In the place I came from, peace couldn’t even be seen on the horizon. But in the London of the 1990s, there was no such dichotomy. Painfully enough, this has changed. On a daily basis our media outlets repeat the idiotic question: “Why do they hate us so much?” By now it is rather clear, the binary opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’ has made it into an integral part of the British discourse as well.

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Memo to the Media: Libby Outrage is Not Confined to “the Left”

Thursday, July 5th, 2007 by RLR

From The Huffington Post
By Arianna Huffington

mediaHere we go again. No sooner had President Bush commuted the sentence of Prisoner 28301-016 (”Cheney’s Cheney” to his pals), and the champagne begun to flow at Mary Matalin’s house, than the media launched into its usual, knee-jerk attempt to analyze the response to the decision in terms of right vs left.

Airwaves and news pages were quickly filled with talk of “outrage from the left,” “criticism from the left,” and how the commutation “will further drive the left crazy.”

It’s positively Pavlovian. Ring the issue bell, and reporters start to drool about right vs left. Even when the facts show that the Libby commutation — like the war in Iraq, like the war on drugs, like global warming — is not an issue that splits along right/left lines.

In a SurveyUSA poll taken immediately after the commutation was announced, 60 percent of those surveyed said they disagreed with the decision, including 35 percent of conservatives. And, in an earlier Time magazine/SRBI poll, 72 percent said they would disapprove of a pardon. So unless “the left” has recently had an incredible growth spurt, a lot of people on the so-called “right” are feeling outraged too.

And if this was so clearly a right/left issue, how come only Tom Tancredo and Sam Brownback offered an unequivocal “Yes” during the New Hampshire debate when asked if they would pardon Libby (the other candidates either said “No,” or took a wait-and-see stance)?

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