snippetaroo

What kind of nut wants war with Iran?

fred Did a great write-up today on freddevan.com
Here’s a quick excerpt:

By Joseph Galloway
McClatchy Newspapers
There were some things far more frightening last week than Halloween’s small ghouls and goblins — and the scariest of all is the Bush administration’s seemingly inexorable march toward military confrontation with Iran.What are they smoking at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.? The very idea is dumb as a fencepost and best left to the biggest pied piper of what passes for neoconservative thought, Norman Podhoretz. Yet President Bush and his able assistant, Vice President Dick Cheney, are marching to that tune and humming along lustily.
There is no crisis here and no earthly reason to manufacture one on short notice, except for the fact that in less than 15 months, the Bush administration will pass ignominiously into history. Then a new chief executive can begin dealing with ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a national debt nearing $10 trillion, a terrorist threat to America only made stronger by eight […]

More on this post here

I’m Talking to the Ass in the Mirror

fred Posted something interesting today on freddevan.com
The first few lines are here:

To read it in its entirety, click here

Pirates of Private Equity

fred Blogged something interesting today on freddevan.com
Here’s a summary….

An insanely lucrative investment strategy finally faces public scrutiny
by Adam Doster

Employees knew that Hastings Manufacturing Co., a family-owned auto-parts supplier 30 miles south of Grand Rapids, Mich., was in deep water. Facing financial pressure, 375 employees–two-thirds of whom were in the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) bargaining unit–conceded $1 million in benefits to save their company, relinquishing newly negotiated pay raises and agreeing to cover part of their own health care costs.
But according to UAW Local 138 Chief Steward Kim Townsend, who testified before the House Commercial and Administrative Law subcommittee in September, when Hastings’ management declared bankruptcy and was taken over by the private equity firm Anderson Group in December 2005, the slicing didn’t stop there. Sick days were cut in half, an existing two-tier wage system with a top rate of $13.49 an hour was maintained and the allotment for bargaining time was limited to two hours a month […]

More on this post here

From the Desk of Donald Rumsfeld . . .

fred Did a great write-up today on freddevan.com
The first paragraph….

In Sometimes-Brusque ‘Snowflakes,’ He Shared Worldview, Shaped Policy
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid “physical labor” and wrote of the need to “keep elevating the threat,” “link Iraq to Iran” and develop “bumper sticker statements” to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war.
The memos, often referred to as “snowflakes,” shed light on Rumsfeld’s brusque management style and on his efforts to address key challenges during his tenure as Pentagon chief. Spanning from 2002 to shortly after his resignation following the 2006 congressional elections, a sampling of his trademark missives obtained yesterday reveals a defense secretary disdainful of media criticism and driven to reshape public opinion of the Iraq war.
Rumsfeld, whose sometimes abrasive approach often alienated other Cabinet members and White House staff members, produced 20 to 60 snowflakes a day and […]

To read it in its entirety, click here

Channeling Bush’s Inner Sadist

fred Did an interesting post today on freddevan.com
Read this summary….

An Insight Into His Obsession with Torture
We were writing a review of a BuzzFlash premium of a collection of Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” cartoons last weekend when we serendipitously came across this tidbit, posted in a 2004 Associated Press article (watch for the end of the excerpt):
Cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who has skewered politicians for decades in his comic strip “Doonesbury,” tells Rolling Stone magazine he remembers Yale classmate George W. Bush as “just another sarcastic preppy who gave people nicknames and arranged for keg deliveries.”
Trudeau attended Yale University with Bush in the late 1960s and served with him on a dormitory social committee.
“Even then he had clearly awesome social skills,” Trudeau said. “He could also make you feel extremely uncomfortable … He was extremely skilled at controlling people and outcomes in that way. Little bits of perfectly placed humiliation.”
…. Trudeau said he penned his very first cartoon to illustrate an article […]

Read the entire post here

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

fred Blogged about a good topic today on freddevan.com
The first paragraph is here:

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all
Tuesday April 24, 2007
The Guardian
Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.
They were not […]

More on this post here

As Far as Bush and Cheney are Concerned, Mission Accomplished.

fred Wrote an interesting post today on freddevan.com
Read this summary….

Greg Palast in Chicago on October 27th at an Event Sponsored by BuzzFlash.com: Toward the end of the Clinton Adminsitration the Price of a Barrel of Oil was Below $20, Now It Has Reached an All-Time Record of More than $90 a Barrel. As Far as Bush and Cheney are Concerned, Mission Accomplished.
Speaking before a full crowd in Chicago on Saturday evening, October 27, the indefatigable investigative reporter Greg Palast challenged the conventional wisdom that the Iraq War is a failure for Cheney and Bush.
Palast, of course, agrees that it is a disaster from the perspective of loss of life and a prodigious waste of dollars — and that it is harmful to the national interests of the United States. But, he contends that from the perspective of Cheney and Bush the war has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Why?
Because, Iraq has become a huge “profit center” for […]

Read the rest of this great post here

Putting a Country in Your Tank

fred Did a great write-up today on freddevan.com
The first bit is quoted here:

Iraq Policy Floating on a Sea of Oil
History… phooey!
Or, more mildly, Americans traditionally aren’t much interested in it and the media largely don’t have time for it either. For one thing, the past is often just so inconvenient. On Monday, for instance, there was a front-page piece in the New York Times by Elisabeth Bumiller on Robert Blackwill, one of the “Vulcans” who helped Condoleezza Rice advise George W. Bush on foreign policy during the 2000 election campaign, Iraq Director on the National Security Council during the reign in Baghdad of our viceroy L. Paul Bremer III, and the President’s personal envoy to the faltering occupation (nicknamed “The Shadow”), among many other things.
He is now — here’s a giant shock — a lobbyist. And, among those he’s lobbying for (in this case to the tune of $300,000) is Ayad Allawi, former CIA asset and head — back in Saddam’s […]

More on this post here

The Military Death Toll While Enforcing the Occupation of Iraq

fred Blogged about a good topic today on freddevan.com
The first paragraph….

A Data Sheet of US-uk Military Fatalities Post-May 1, 2003
by Paul de Rooij
Recent Quotes
More than 800 of them have lost an arm, a leg, fingers or toes. More than 100 are blind. Dozens need tubes and machines to keep them alive. Hundreds are disfigured by burns, and thousands have brain injuries and damaged minds. These are America’s war wounded, a toll that has received less attention than the 3,500 troops killed in Iraq. Depending on how you count them, they number between 35,000 and 53,000. More of them are coming home, with injuries of a scope and magnitude the government did not predict and is now struggling to treat.
…
Survival rates today are even higher than the record levels set early in the war, because of body armor and better care. For every American soldier or Marine killed in Iraq, 15 others have survived illness or injury there. Unlike in previous […]

Get the full story here

The Ugly Truth About the GOP Base and Race

fred Made an interesting post today on freddevan.com
The first few lines….

Do they think it’s just a coincidence that GOP presidential candidates won’t go near the African American debates?

By Jane Hamsher
This post, written by Jane Hamsher, originally appeared on FireDogLake
I was on Bonnie Erbe’s To the Contrary yesterday and we were discussing Mike Huckabee’s contention that we’d have plenty of people willing to do menial jobs in the US if only there weren’t so damn many abortions. I made the comment that Huckabee was obviously killing two birds with one stone — appealing to the anti-woman and racist elements of the Republican base at the same time, to which the two conservative women on the panel gave a giant “harumph.”
From Rick Perlstein’s article entitled “The Unspoken Truth about the GOP. Southern Discomfort” in The New Republic:
The very heart of his argument is a taboo notion: that the South votes Republican because the Republicans have perfected their appeal to Southern racism, and […]

To read it in its entirety, click here