I'm pissed off at the Republicans. I hope the party goes extinct. Really. because I don't believe they have the best interests of the country at heart.

Actually let me rephrase that, what's best for the the political party is often bad for the country. The government has to build consensus in order to get anything done, but the party loyalist is interested in conflict, making the other team look bad. You can't govern in that context. You can't be a partisan loyalist and a patriot at the same time.

For America's sake, I hope they actually are patriots, and I'm trying to understand why they act this way.

Why are they so divisive, why are they so misleading, why do they refuse to compromise?

In case you missed it, no Republicans in the house of Representatives voted for the economic recovery package. What's up with the herd of opposition?

If you are working on some legislation, you propose an idea or you advocate for some changes, and when those changes make it into the final bill you usually vote for it. The democrats took out a bunch of 'liberal' provisions and 'wasteful spending'. The Democrats compromised, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the public trusts the ideas of Democrats when it comes to the economy.

The republicans got a lot of what they wanted, much more than they ever gave the Democrats. But not a single house republican voted for the economic recovery bill. You'll see the republicans all over the media criticizing the bill, and offering no suggestions for improving it, except tax cuts or reducing the price tag (both of which would make the bill less effective).

Why?

I have a few ideas.

Maybe it's the permanent campaign mentality. Your team must win, and the other team must lose. Therefore the other team can absolutely never have a good idea, unless they agree with you of course. And when they agree with you, you get to say I told you so and call them weak.

Maybe it's their conservative market philosophy of self-interest spilling over into everyday life. The 'invisible hand' of the market, where if everyone follows their own rational self-interest, we magically end up with the best collective solution too. So they are all looking out for their own self interest first and foremost. Which I guess means winning elections, hoarding power, making lots of money, and get lots of campaign contributions and political favors.

Maybe redistricting and gerrymandering plays a role too. House members represent little pieces of a state, so they put the democrats on democratic pieces and the republicans on republican pieces. So the voters in their district largely prefer to keep the same party every year. Their seats are in safe Republican territory, they don't have to fear running against a Democrat (there usually is none, the incumbent is unopposed anyway) So the only thing they have to worry about is another Republican challenging them in the primary. And they only way that could happen is if the incumbent pisses of his donors, and they fund the opposition instead.

hmmm, following the logic in that last one, I guess it's about the money?


well none of those are patriotic reasons, but they seem the most logical to me. I mean, we've tried tax cuts for 8 years, did George "the king of tax cuts" Bush miss that one essential tax cut that will fix all our problems?


Maybe the Senate won't be so confrontational. They each represent an entire state, which is more politically diverse than a house district. and they also have more time between elections. Maybe they'll act more like statesmen, then their brothers in the House who look like prep school punks.

I doubt the Senate would filibuster, this is a popular bill, and they can't afford to slow it down. Especially after Obama has shown them so much compromise and respect (especially compared to the last 20 years).

Let them vote against it, and watch in horror when it passes and actually puts people back to work. Then all the campaign commercials in 2010 will ominously say "he voted against Obama's recovery package. Wrong on the economy, wrong for America"

State of Denial: Two months before 9/11, Rice gave the 'brush-off' to 'impending terrorist attack' warning

Ron Brynaert
Published: Saturday September 30, 2006
From Raw Story


(Update: Former Counsel to the 9/11 Commission suggests that "[v]ery possibly, someone committed a crime" by engaging in a "cover-up" of the warning)

According to a new book written by Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward, two months before the September 11 attacks, then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice gave the "brush-off" to an "impending terrorist attack" warning by former C.I.A. director George J. Tenet and his counterterrorism coordinator.

An article in Friday's New York Times first mentioned the warning, and a front page book review of Woodward's State of Denial in Saturday's edition provides more details.

"On July 10, 2001, the book says, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice at the White House to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence the agency was collecting about an impending attack," David E. Sanger reported on Friday. "But both men came away from the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had not taken the warnings seriously."

Sanger also reported that Tenet told Woodward that before 9/11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was "impeding" efforts to catch Osama bin Laden.

"Mr. Woodward writes that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was impeding the effort to develop a coherent strategy to capture or kill Osama bin Laden," wrote Sanger. "Mr. Rumsfeld questioned the electronic signals from terrorism suspects that the National Security Agency had been intercepting, wondering whether they might be part of an elaborate deception plan by Al Qaeda."

Saturday's New York Times review claims that in Woodward's book, Rice "is depicted as a presidential enabler, ineffectual at her job of coordinating interagency strategy and planning."

"For instance, Mr. Woodward writes that on July 10, 2001, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism coordinator, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice to warn her of mounting intelligence about an impending terrorist attack, but came away feeling they’d been given 'the brush-off' — a revealing encounter, given Ms. Rice’s recent comments, rebutting former President Bill Clinton’s allegations that the Bush administration had failed to pursue counterterrorism measures aggressively before 9/11," writes Michiko Kakutani.

Saturday's Washington Post has more details regarding the meeting.

"The book also reports that then-CIA Director George J. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, grew so concerned in the summer of 2001 about a possible al-Qaeda attack that they drove straight to the White House to get high-level attention," Peter Baker reports for the Post.

"Tenet called Rice, then the national security adviser, from his car to ask to see her, in hopes that the surprise appearance would make an impression. But the meeting on July 10, 2001, left Tenet and Black frustrated and feeling brushed off, Woodward reported," the article continues. "Rice, they thought, did not seem to feel the same sense of urgency about the threat and was content to wait for an ongoing policy review."

Excerpts from Post article:
#

The report of such a meeting takes on heightened importance after former president Bill Clinton said this week that the Bush team did not do enough to try to kill Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said her husband would have paid more attention to warnings of a possible attack than Bush did. Rice fired back on behalf of the current president, saying the Bush administration "was at least as aggressive" in eight months as President Clinton had been in eight years.

The July 10 meeting of Rice, Tenet and Black went unmentioned in various investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, and Woodward wrote that Black "felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about."

Jamie S. Gorelick, a member of the Sept. 11 commission, said she checked with commission staff members who told her investigators were never told about a July 10 meeting. "We didn't know about the meeting itself," she said. "I can assure you it would have been in our report if we had known to ask about it."

White House and State Department officials yesterday confirmed that the July 10 meeting took place, although they took issue with Woodward's portrayal of its results. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, responding on behalf of Rice, said Tenet and Black had never publicly expressed any frustration with her response.

"This is the first time these thoughts and feelings associated with that meeting have been expressed," McCormack said. "People are free to revise and extend their remarks, but that is certainly not the story that was told to the 9/11 commission."
#

FULL POST ARTICLE AT THIS LINK
'This is going to be the big one'

Another Post article slated for Sunday's edition provides even more details.

"For months, Tenet had been pressing Rice to set a clear counterterrorism policy, including specific presidential orders, called "findings," that would give the CIA stronger authority to conduct covert action against bin Laden," the uncredited Post article reports. "Perhaps a dramatic appearance -- Black called it an 'out of cycle' session, beyond Tenet's regular weekly meeting with Rice -- would get her attention."

J. Cofer Black later said that "[t]he only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head."

Excerpts from Sunday's Post article:
#

Tenet had been losing sleep over the recent intelligence. There was no conclusive, smoking-gun intelligence, but there was such a huge volume of data that an intelligence officer's instinct strongly suggested that something was coming.

He did not know when, where or how, but Tenet felt there was too much noise in the intelligence systems. Two weeks earlier, he had told Richard A. Clarke, the National Security Council's counterterrorism director: "It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one."

But Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the intelligence, asking: Could it all be a grand deception? Perhaps, he said, it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses.

Tenet had the National Security Agency review all the intercepts, and the agency concluded they were of genuine al-Qaeda communications. On June 30, a top-secret senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined "Bin Laden Threats Are Real."

....

Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated. Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk. Black felt the decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long. "Adults should not have a system like this," he said later.
#

An "editor's note" appended to the end of the article notes that "[h]ow much effort the Bush administration made in going after Osama bin Laden before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, became an issue last week after former president Bill Clinton accused President Bush's 'neocons' and other Republicans of ignoring bin Laden until the attacks."

"Rice responded in an interview that 'what we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years,'" the editor's note continues.

FULL SUNDAY WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE AT THIS LINK
'Very possibly, someone committed a crime'

Saturday night at Think Progress, former Counsel to the 9/11 Commission Peter Rundlet guest-blogged a post called "Bush Officials May Have Covered Up Rice-Tenet Meeting From 9/11 Commission."

"Most of the world has now seen the infamous picture of President Bush tending to his ranch on August 6, 2001, the day he received the ultra-classified Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) that included a report entitled 'Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US,'" Rundlet blogs. "And most Americans have also heard of the so-called 'Phoenix Memo' that an FBI agent in Phoenix sent to FBI headquarters on July 10, 2001, which advised of the 'possibility of a coordinated effort' by bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation schools."

But Rundlet writes that a "mixture of shock, anger, and sadness overcame" him when he read about Tenet's "special surprise visit" to see Rice in July of 2001.

"If true, it is shocking that the administration failed to heed such an overwhelming alert from the two officials in the best position to know," writes Rundlet.

"Many, many questions need to be asked and answered about this revelation — questions that the 9/11 Commission would have asked, had the Commission been told about this significant meeting," adds Rundlet. "Suspiciously, the Commissioners and the staff investigating the administration’s actions prior to 9/11 were never informed of the meeting."

Rundlet suggests that the "withholding of information" from the Commission may constitute a crime, and scoffs at Cofer's excuse in Woodward's book.

"Was it covered up?" asks Rundlet. "It is hard to come to a different conclusion."

"If one could suspend disbelief to accept that all three officials forgot about the meeting when they were interviewed, then one possibility is that the memory of one of them was later jogged by notes or documents that describe the meeting," Rundlet continues. "If such documents exist, the 9/11 Commission should have seen them."

Rundlet quotes a line from Woodward's book which he says shows how "Black exonerates them all."

"Though the investigators had access to all the paperwork about the meeting, Black felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn’t want to know about," wrote Woodward in the third volume of Bush at War.

"The notion that both the 9/11 Commission and the Congressional Joint Inquiry that investigated the intelligence prior to 9/11 did not want to know about such essential information is simply absurd," writes Rundlet. "At a minimum, the withholding of information about this meeting is an outrage."

"Very possibly, someone committed a crime," Rundlet concludes. "And worst of all, they failed to stop the plot."

RUNDLET'S ARTICLE CAN BE READ AT THIS LINK
White House: Five Key Myths in Book

On Saturday, the White House "went on the offensive," Caren Bohan reported for Reuters.

In the latest edition in its "Setting the Record Straight" series which uses official statements and media accounts it favors to counter articles in the press or Democratic arguments, the White House lists "Five Key Myths in Woodward's Book." The first "Setting the Record Straight" posted in February of 2005 took on a Washington Post article which reported that a Bush plan would result in participants forfeiting part of their retirement account profits, an assertion the White House blasted as "flat wrong."

To counter the third "myth," the White House presents the "fact" that "according to State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack, the recollections portrayed by Woodward do not reflect Tenet and Black's 9/11 Commission Testimony," then quotes from another Times article written by Sanger.

"But Rice and other State Department officials denied [Woodward's claim], noting that the report of the Sept. 11 commission, which had sworn testimony from Tenet and others at the meeting, made no mention of the July 10 encounter," wrote Sanger. "'The recollections as portrayed in the Woodward book in no way reflect the public and private testimony under oath of those individuals to the 9/11 commission,' said Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman."

The full list of "five myths" can be read at Whitehouse.gov.

Rushing Off a Cliff

Ny Times 9/28/2006
Editorial

Here’s what happens when this irresponsible Congress railroads a profoundly important bill to serve the mindless politics of a midterm election: The Bush administration uses Republicans’ fear of losing their majority to push through ghastly ideas about antiterrorism that will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our 217-year-old nation of laws — while actually doing nothing to protect the nation from terrorists. Democrats betray their principles to avoid last-minute attack ads. Our democracy is the big loser.

Republicans say Congress must act right now to create procedures for charging and trying terrorists — because the men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks are available for trial. That’s pure propaganda. Those men could have been tried and convicted long ago, but President Bush chose not to. He held them in illegal detention, had them questioned in ways that will make real trials very hard, and invented a transparently illegal system of kangaroo courts to convict them.

It was only after the Supreme Court issued the inevitable ruling striking down Mr. Bush’s shadow penal system that he adopted his tone of urgency. It serves a cynical goal: Republican strategists think they can win this fall, not by passing a good law but by forcing Democrats to vote against a bad one so they could be made to look soft on terrorism.

Last week, the White House and three Republican senators announced a terrible deal on this legislation that gave Mr. Bush most of what he wanted, including a blanket waiver for crimes Americans may have committed in the service of his antiterrorism policies. Then Vice President Dick Cheney and his willing lawmakers rewrote the rest of the measure so that it would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to hundreds of men captured in error.

These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws:

Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.

The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret — there’s no requirement that this list be published.

Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.

Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.

Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.

Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.

Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.

•There is not enough time to fix these bills, especially since the few Republicans who call themselves moderates have been whipped into line, and the Democratic leadership in the Senate seems to have misplaced its spine. If there was ever a moment for a filibuster, this was it.

We don’t blame the Democrats for being frightened. The Republicans have made it clear that they’ll use any opportunity to brand anyone who votes against this bill as a terrorist enabler. But Americans of the future won’t remember the pragmatic arguments for caving in to the administration.

They’ll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

D.C. Corruption Eruption

FBI forced to triple fraud probe squads to keep up

BY JAMES GORDON MEEK DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - There is so much political corruption on Capitol Hill that the FBI has had to triple the number of squads investigating lobbyists, lawmakers and influence peddlers, the Daily News has learned. For decades, only one squad in Washington handled corruption cases because the crimes were seen as local offenses handled by FBI field offices in lawmakers' home districts. But in recent years, the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal and other abuses of power and privilege have prompted the FBI to assign 37 agents full-time to three new squads in an office near Capitol Hill. FBI Assistant Director Chip Burrus told The News yesterday that he wants to detail even more agents to the Washington field office for a fourth corruption squad because so much wrongdoing is being uncovered. "Traditionally, a congressional bribery case might be conducted on Main Street U.S.A., but a lot of the stuff we're finding these days is here in Washington," said Burrus, who heads the FBI's criminal division. He said typical crimes involve lawmakers' illegal interactions with lobbyists and "people who have a lot of savvy about how the congressional process works and appropriations." Plus, the electronic and legislative paper trail that winds up as evidence is in Washington, as Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio) and ex-Rep. Randy (Duke) Cunningham (R-Calif.) can attest. Ney has agreed to plead guilty to corruption charges. Cunningham was sentenced to eight years in the slammer for taking bribes. Two years ago, only 400 agents worked on public corruption cases. Now, 615 agents nationwide - including 30 in New York - are trying to nail public servants for betraying the public trust in 2,200 ongoing cases. A recent FBI search of the Alaska Statehouse was a first of its kind. In Washington, agents conducted unprecedented searches of the offices of the CIA's third-ranking executive and the House office of Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.). Both stemmed from bribery allegations. Burrus wouldn't speculate about why there is so much graft, but said, "We have to pull the whole weed up or it's just going to grow back again." Originally published on September 19, 2006

U.N. Inspectors Dispute Iran Report By House Panel
Paper on Nuclear Aims Called Dishonest

By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 14, 2006; A17

U.N. inspectors investigating Iran's nuclear program angrily complained to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman yesterday about a recent House committee report on Iran's capabilities, calling parts of the document "outrageous and dishonest" and offering evidence to refute its central claims.

Officials of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency said in a letter that the report contained some "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements." The letter, signed by a senior director at the agency, was addressed to Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, which issued the report. A copy was hand-delivered to Gregory L. Schulte, the U.S. ambassador to the IAEA in Vienna.

The IAEA openly clashed with the Bush administration on pre-war assessments of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Relations all but collapsed when the agency revealed that the White House had based some allegations about an Iraqi nuclear program on forged documents.

After no such weapons were found in Iraq, the IAEA came under additional criticism for taking a cautious approach on Iran, which the White House says is trying to build nuclear weapons in secret. At one point, the administration orchestrated a campaign to remove the IAEA's director general, Mohamed ElBaradei. It failed, and he won the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

Yesterday's letter, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post, was the first time the IAEA has publicly disputed U.S. allegations about its Iran investigation. The agency noted five major errors in the committee's 29-page report, which said Iran's nuclear capabilities are more advanced than either the IAEA or U.S. intelligence has shown.

Among the committee's assertions is that Iran is producing weapons-grade uranium at its facility in the town of Natanz. The IAEA called that "incorrect," noting that weapons-grade uranium is enriched to a level of 90 percent or more. Iran has enriched uranium to 3.5 percent under IAEA monitoring.

When the congressional report was released last month, Hoekstra said his intent was "to help increase the American public's understanding of Iran as a threat." Spokesman Jamal Ware said yesterday that Hoekstra will respond to the IAEA letter.

Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), a committee member, said the report was "clearly not prepared in a manner that we can rely on." He agreed to send it to the full committee for review, but the Republicans decided to make it public before then, he said in an interview.

The report was never voted on or discussed by the full committee. Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the vice chairman, told Democratic colleagues in a private e-mail that the report "took a number of analytical shortcuts that present the Iran threat as more dire -- and the Intelligence Community's assessments as more certain -- than they are."

Privately, several intelligence officials said the committee report included at least a dozen claims that were either demonstrably wrong or impossible to substantiate. Hoekstra's office said the report was reviewed by the office of John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence.

Negroponte's spokesman, John Callahan, said in a statement that his office "reviewed the report and provided its response to the committee on July 24, '06." He did not say whether it had approved or challenged any of the claims about Iran's capabilities.

"This is like prewar Iraq all over again," said David Albright, a former nuclear inspector who is president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. "You have an Iranian nuclear threat that is spun up, using bad information that's cherry-picked and a report that trashes the inspectors."

The committee report, written by a single Republican staffer with a hard-line position on Iran, chastised the CIA and other agencies for not providing evidence to back assertions that Iran is building nuclear weapons.

It concluded that the lack of intelligence made it impossible to support talks with Tehran. Democrats on the committee saw it as an attempt from within conservative Republican circles to undermine Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has agreed to talk with the Iranians under certain conditions.

The report's author, Fredrick Fleitz, is a onetime CIA officer and special assistant to John R. Bolton, the administration's former point man on Iran at the State Department. Bolton, who is now ambassador to the United Nations, had been highly influential during President Bush's first term in drawing up a tough policy that rejected talks with Tehran.

Among the allegations in Fleitz's Iran report is that ElBaradei removed a senior inspector from the Iran investigation because he raised "concerns about Iranian deception regarding its nuclear program." The agency said the inspector has not been removed.

A suggestion that ElBaradei had an "unstated" policy that prevented inspectors from telling the truth about Iran's program was particularly "outrageous and dishonest," according to the IAEA letter, which was signed by Vilmos Cserveny, the IAEA's director for external affairs and a former Hungarian ambassador.

Hoekstra's committee is working on a separate report about North Korea that is also being written principally by Fleitz. A draft of the report, provided to The Post, includes several assertions about North Korea's weapons program that the intelligence officials said they cannot substantiate, including one that Pyongyang is already enriching uranium.

The intelligence community believes North Korea is trying to acquire an enrichment capability but has no proof that an enrichment facility has been built, the officials said.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

CA-04: Ask an Iraqi War Veteran Who Supports the Troops? Certainly Not Doolittle.

by Charlie Brown for Congress
Tue Sep 05, 2006 at 12:49:43 PM PDT

Hawkish Members of Congress who never served one day in uniform (like my opponent John Doolittle) like to equate speaking out against the mistakes and missteps of this Administration on matters of national security with "not supporting the troops." Exhibit A is Doolittle's most recent column on the subject.

Like his "stay the course" colleagues, Doolittle's hopeless strategy here is to try and distract voters from his hypocritical record on the subject by smearing his opponents. Unfortunately, no amount of taxpayer funded campaign mailers will change the fact that he voted to send our troops to war in Iraq without a plan, proper equipment, or sound intelligence. It won't change the growing tensions in Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and elsewhere that have occurred under John Doolittle's watch. And it certainly won't change the fact that he had the second worst record in the entire House of Representatives on Veterans issues in the 109th Congress (per Disabled American Veterans).

I wasn't the only one who noticed. My son, an Iraqi War Veteran and Air Force Captain who co-piloted Doolittle from Baghdad to Tal-Afar back in February took exception to Doolittle's recent column while home a few weeks ago on leave. His response to Doolittle is below, from the Sept. 5th edition of the Roseville Press-Tribune.

DOOLITTLE KNOWS VERY LITTLE ABOUT "SUPPORTING THE TROOPS"

I read Congressmen Doolittle's recent Op-Ed ("Support Our Troops, Don't Exploit Them") while home from duty overseas. As an Iraq War veteran, I found his claims of support for our military men and women, and his comments about Charlie Brown infuriating.

Doolittle suggests that if you do not agree with the political decision to go to war, then you do not support the troops. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I've traveled all over this country, and met people both for and against the war. Regardless of which side they fall on, everyone I meet supports the warriors. Many send care packages, body armor and helmets. Others advocate for veterans rights or volunteer to help homeless veterans and families coping with the absence of a loved one. Actions speak louder than words.

Career politicians like Doolittle say they support us, because that's all they can do. Yet their voting records, official actions, and appalling misuse of taxpayer dollars tell a very different story. Veterans, both past and present, are not fooled by the empty rhetoric.

How many vehicle armor plates could "fiscally conservative" Doolittle have bought with the taxpayer money he wasted sending out campaign mailers in August? How many sets of body armor could have been bought with his $1,000 per month taxpayer subsidized car lease? Why did Doolittle vote to allow more than $400 million in VA funding to be cut from a recent appropriations bill so that $700 million could be spent to move railroad tracks closer to casinos in Mississippi? And, would someone who "supports the troops" blow off a vote on VA benefits to attend a fundraiser with VP Cheney? Was it because he pocketed 15% from the event?

If John Doolittle really "supports the troops," why won't he give the dirty money that he's taken from convicted felons to one of the many charities that serve veterans in need? He can't possibly need the money--he already earns more than 4 times as much as the average soldier in Iraq.

Perhaps if Doolittle didn't get all those military deferments, he would understand what it's like to serve, and what soldiers see. Perhaps then, he could tell the difference between giving troops lip service and truly supporting them.

That's why I couldn't be prouder of my father Charlie Brown. He's dedicated his life to defending America, leading with honor, and standing up for veterans.

Doolittle's column is as disingenuous as his recent trip to Iraq---desperate attempts to distract the public from a record not worth running on, and growing scrutiny of his possible criminal acts.

Sorry Mr. Doolittle, but-when it comes to "supporting the troops," Charlie Brown is way out of your league.

-Jeff Brown, Ramstein AB, Germany"

Near the close of my 26 year Air Force career, I served two rotations coordinating surveillance flights over Iraq's "No Fly Zones" (mid 1990's). I attended the General's briefings every morning, spoke with intelligence officers, and we regularly discussed what we would target if we went to war with Iraq the next day. As I've reported on many occasions, no one was worried about WMD during those times, because we knew those programs had been shut down.

Accordingly, I spoke out early and often against the false assertions used to justify the U.S. led invasion of Iraq. Now that we are there, I've consistently called for a timetable for re-deploying our troops elsewhere, turning over authority to Iraqis, and reducing the suspicion of occupation that is fueling insurgent violence and civil war. And, I support an immediate end to the "make it up as we go along" security strategy that has so dangerously isolated our country from the allies around the world that are needed to win a Global War on Terror. Most importantly, I recognize that when it comes to keeping our promise to veterans, the true measure of leadership is performance--not empty rhetoric. And the only acceptable result is "no one left behind."

Only 63 days left until election day. It's well past time for a change.

You can learn more about the campaign by clicking here.

You can make a contribution to our cause by clicking here.

- Charlie

I found this post through the web of the internet and thought it was a rare and clever perspective.

Here is the original post on MySpace

---

An Open Letter To Three Preceding Generations

To Whom It May Concern,

I would like to thank the Greatest Generation, The Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers, for providing me with this glorious world I have recently inherited. There are so many of you that by about 2025 people over the age of 55 will probably make up about 1/3 of the country. Soon enough, the Baby Boomers will be retiring and the children of the hippies, Gen X'ers and Generation Yers will be taking the horse by the reins, and we will hopefully lead the country as well as you have. Thanks for the honor, we will make you proud.

Oh wait, I just looked the horse in the mouth, and it might as well be a dead mare, since it comes with an $8.5 TRILLION NATIONAL DEBT, and in New Jersey she comes with an extra $29 BILLION IN STATE DEBT.

It seems to me like you guys threw a big party, made a huge mess, and now you guys are going to be retiring, shipping off to Florida, and leaving us with a huge mess to deal with. A nice analogy for this situation would be that you're leaving me to foot the bill for your life-long kegger. Thanks guys, I only wish I could pay you back, someway, somehow.

Forgive me for being more than a little angry about you guys (as a collective) taking it upon yourselves to make sure you take it easy. After all, let us be honest here, the generation before you survived the Great Depression, fought World War II and the Korean War and made America what it was, and theyre moving out of existence as we speak. The Silent Generation grew up during the great depression and, sat back and enjoyed the post-WWII prosperity. But what can we expect from a generation like the Baby Boomers that has never really had to work for their holdings. You were born into fabulous wealth, the likes of which the world has never seen and lived what became the "American Dream" as many of you lived in plush homes and had hard working parents. You lived in the most stable society in the world with a very firm set of social mores and order. Then, your generation challenged the established order, throwing out the old ways with a new way of doing things, with high tech, high energy, low cost, low effort lives. The boomers survived the Vietnam War and weathered the gas shortages and recessions of the 70s and 80s. You pioneered the disposable society, the fast food nation, basically took the Free Market to a whole different level.

Through all of this, you have all made sure to that you had everything you needed and everything you desired. You made sure that the evil, greedy, power hungry government doesn't get a nickel of YOUR hard earned money. You managed to accomplish this by opposing every measure to raise taxes and by voting out anyone who actually had the utter gall to raise taxes. But you sadly lacked the will, the vision and the energy to do the same for anyone who didn't bother to balance a budget.

I have a real problem with this because in your short sightedness you didn't bother to look down the road to the foreseeable future where you would actually have to pay for those unbalanced budgets. You didn't seem to realize in all of your infinite wisdom that when you borrow money from somebody, you have to pay them back, with considerable interest.

Between 1974 and 1997, the Federal Government ran 23 years of consecutive deficits. If any average American citizen spent more money than he or she earned for 23 years straight, they would be in serious trouble. The same is true for New Jersey, which went more than a decade of without a balanced budget, and now all these many years of poor fiscal management have culminated in new taxes and cuts.

Technically the state and federal government could fix the financial crunch by cutting spending, but God knows you oldsters would never consent to this. You would all be furious as your cars drove over pot holes that would go unfixed, as you waited on even longer lines at the DMV, as your local taxes went up to pay for the lack of State and Federal money that had to be cut to balance the budget. You would be furious about the rise in crime from the lack of available police, the rise in the cost of energy from the lack of government subsidies pouring into corporations, the lack of money going to museums and national parks and you would be more than aggravated about any other cutback in the government service you need. You would all surely be ready to kill if you heard your Social Security would be cut back to deal with the crunch you had tacitly approved of at the polls 20 years ago.

For these reasons, I am furious that you, the preceding generations of Americans, have been so pig-headed and whiney. You have not come up with a solution to the problems you have created and are now set on the fact that you deserve to continue living this charmed life, at my expense, at least until you finish out your lives. You realize the need to spend money, but dont like Governor Corzine's tax hike, which is largely dedicated to dealing with the crushing interest on debt and property tax repulsive as you found Jim Florio's tax hike, which lead to his eviction from Drumthwacket. Such thinking reminds me of Louis XV, the King of France who refused to deal with the distant rumblings of domestic discontentment and famously said, After me, the deluge. His son and daughter-in-law, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, would eventually be beheaded during the French Revolution.

But instead of complaining and not offering a constructive, viable solution to these problems, I will break from the pack, and propose an "Over 40 Tax." I think this is a perfectly reasonable answer to our dilemma. Yes, I know that such a tax targets a certain segment of the population unfairly, but why should I, a young person of 18 with my entire life ahead of me who has only just recently entered the workforce and registered to vote, pay for the mistakes you made when you voted for idiot politicians like Christie Whitman, Jim McGreevey, Ronald Reagan and the two Bush Presidents. These guys (and the lone gal) went off and spent money they didn't have, and you let them. You failed to speak up, or at least didn't speak up loud enough. You let it slide, knowing there would be consequences and I'll be damned if I will be paying many times more in state and federal taxes than you ever did just to pay for your failure to act adequately and finance your Social Security checks so you can sit on a beach in South Florida until you die of living the easy life. Is it too much to ask that you are held accountable for your poor selection of leaders? After all, I seem to remember Ronald Reagan and every other adult telling me for as long as I can remember that life boils down to personal responsibility.

In closing, I feel more upset about the principle and the perceived lack of civic respect you seem to have for your subsequent generations. The whole thing about the money isn't so much the problem as it is the manifestation of the bigger problem: That you didn't take your job as an American citizen seriously. You should all be ashamed of yourselves, as you have been very poor stewards of this country. You have not led, and because of it, your posterity will pay the price for decades to come.

Cool Chart

http://www.uuforum.org/deficit.htm

Hezbollah Leads Work to Rebuild, Gaining Stature

By JOHN KIFNER
NY Times

August 16, 2006

The Overview

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Aug. 15 — As stunned Lebanese returned Tuesday over broken roads to shattered apartments in the south, it increasingly seemed that the beneficiary of the destruction was most likely to be Hezbollah.

A major reason — in addition to its hard-won reputation as the only Arab force that fought Israel to a standstill — is that it is already dominating the efforts to rebuild with a torrent of money from oil-rich Iran.

Nehme Y. Tohme, a member of Parliament from the anti-Syrian reform bloc and the country’s minister for the displaced, said he had been told by Hezbollah officials that when the shooting stopped, Iran would provide Hezbollah with an “unlimited budget” for reconstruction.

In his victory speech on Monday night, Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, offered money for “decent and suitable furniture” and a year’s rent on a house to any Lebanese who lost his home in the month-long war.

“Completing the victory,” he said, “can come with reconstruction.”

On Tuesday, Israel began to pull many of its reserve troops out of southern Lebanon, and its military chief of staff said all of the soldiers could be back across the border within 10 days. Lebanese soldiers are expected to begin moving in a couple of days, supported by the first of 15,000 foreign troops.

While the Israelis began their withdrawal, hundreds of Hezbollah members spread over dozens of villages across southern Lebanon began cleaning, organizing and surveying damage. Men on bulldozers were busy cutting lanes through giant piles of rubble. Roads blocked with the remnants of buildings are now, just a day after a cease-fire began, fully passable.

In Sreifa, a Hezbollah official said the group would offer an initial $10,000 to residents to help pay for the year of rent, to buy new furniture and to help feed families.

In Taibe, a town of fighting so heavy that large chunks were missing from walls and buildings where they had been sprayed with bullets, the Audi family stood with two Hezbollah volunteers, looking woefully at their windowless, bullet- and shrapnel-torn house.

In Bint Jbail, Hezbollah ambulances — large, new cars with flashing lights on the top — ferried bodies of fighters to graves out of mountains of rubble.

Hezbollah’s reputation as an efficient grass-roots social service network — as opposed to the Lebanese government, regarded by many here as sleek men in suits doing well — was in evidence everywhere. Young men with walkie-talkies and clipboards were in the battered Shiite neighborhoods on the southern edge of Bint Jbail, taking notes on the extent of the damage.

“Hezbollah’s strength,” said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a professor at the Lebanese American University here, who has written extensively about the organization, in large part derives from “the gross vacuum left by the state.”

Hezbollah was not, she said, a state within a state, but rather “a state within a nonstate, actually.”

Sheik Nasrallah said in his speech that “the brothers in the towns and villages will turn to those whose homes are badly damaged and help rebuild them.

“Today is the day to keep up our promises,” he said. “All our brothers will be in your service starting tomorrow.”

Some southern towns were so damaged that on Tuesday residents had not yet begun to return. A fighter for the Amal movement, another Shiite militia group, said he had been told that Hezbollah members would begin to catalog damages in his town, Kafr Kila, on the Israeli border.

Hezbollah men also traveled door to door checking on residents and asking them what help they needed.

Although Hezbollah is a Shiite organization, Sheik Nasrallah’s message resounded even with a Sunni Muslim, Ghaleb Jazi, 40, who works at the oil storage plant at Jiyeh, 15 miles south of Beirut. It was bombed by the Israelis and spewed pollution northward into the Mediterranean.

“The government may do some work on bridges and roads, but when it comes to rebuilding houses, Hezbollah will have a big role to play,” he said. “Nasrallah said yesterday he would rebuild, and he will come through.”

Sheik Nasrallah’s speech was interpreted by some as a kind of watershed in Lebanese politics, establishing his group on an equal footing with the official government.

“It was a coup d’état,” said Jad al-Akjaoui, a political analyst aligned with the democratic reform bloc. He was among the organizers of the anti-Syrian demonstrations after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri two years ago that led to international pressure to rid Lebanon of 15 years of Syrian control.

Rami G. Khouri, a columnist for The Daily Star in Beirut, wrote that Sheik Nasrallah “seemed to take on the veneer of a national leader rather than the head of one group in Lebanon’s rich mosaic of political parties.”

“In tone and content, his remarks seemed more like those of a president or a prime minister should be making while addressing the nation after a terrible month of destruction and human suffering,” Mr. Khouri wrote. “His prominence is one of the important political repercussions of this war.”

Defense Minister Elias Murr said Tuesday that the government would not seek to disarm Hezbollah.

“The army is not going to the south to strip the Hezbollah of its weapons and do the work that Israel did not,” he said, showing just how difficult reining in the militia will most likely be in the coming weeks and months. He added that “the resistance,” meaning Hezbollah, had been cooperating with the government and there was no need to confront it.

Sheik Nasrallah sounded much like a governor responding to a disaster when he said, “So far, the initial count available to us on completely demolished houses exceeds 15,000 residential units.

“We cannot of course wait for the government and its heavy vehicles and machinery because they could be a while,” he said. He also cautioned, “No one should raise prices due to a surge in demand.”

Support for Hezbollah was likely to become stronger, Professor Saad-Ghorayeb said, because of the weakness of the central government.

“Hezbollah has two pillars of support,” she said, “the resistance and the social services. What this war has illustrated is that it is best at both.

Referring to Shiek Nasrallah, she said: “He tells the people, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to protect you. And we’re going to reconstruct. This has happened before. We will deliver.’ ”

Hassan M. Fattah contributed reporting from Sreifa, Lebanon, for this article, Sabrina Tavernise from Taibe and Robert F. Worth from Jiyeh.