politics
"I bought it for myself but never used it. I was tempted but I never used it," Mr Haggard said. He said he threw it away.(BBC)
Does anyone actually believe that after Clinton's pathetic "didn't inhale" loophole?
Funny how everything Republicans and their supports hate and fear about sin-mongering, terrorist-supporting, drug-taking Democrats turns up in their own backyard. Odd thing, being human...
While campaigning in California yesterday for gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides, Kerry said: “Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”
Kerry’s suggestion “that the men and women of our military are somehow uneducated is insulting and it is shameful,” Bush said at an appearance in Georgia tonight. “The members of the United States military are plenty smart. And they are plenty brave. And the senator from Massachusetts owes them an apology.”
Contrast this with a snippet of a story on NPR earlier this week:
In their living room, Carmelo Roman de Jesus and Gloria Cruz have a shrine to Alexis, a glass cabinet with his baby shoes, baby teeth, toy cars and Medals of Honor. They’re still upset with military recruiters who promised their son $20,000 to enlist.
In an economy without many options for those lacking a college degree, the military can appear to be the only real option. Particularly when recruiters are making empty promises like that.
Michael Moore makes the same point about his home city of Flint, Michigan.
Kerry’s remark could have been better phrased, but Bush’s response shows a typical lack of introspection.
In local elections in Jabłonka — K’s home village in southern Poland — there’s a man running for mayor as a candidate of the Prawo i Spawiedliwość (“Law and Justice”) party, a fairly right-wing party that, like many Republicans, tries to build a base out of religious conservatives. However, he’s running for a position on the county council as a candidate of the Platforma Obywatelska (“Civic Platform”) party, a centrist, left-leaning party, something slightly right of a Clintonian Democrat.
Really, I just don’t know what I could add…
Ah, those Kaczynski boys, they’re a crazy pair:
[Prime Minister] Marcinkiewicz resigned just days after President Kaczynski, 57, canceled a “Weimar Triangle” summit meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Jacques Chirac of France.
These summit meetings were first started 15 years ago, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union to forge closer political, economic and security ties between the three largest countries in the European Union but also to break down decades of suspicions and tension between Warsaw and Berlin.
Kaczynski’s office canceled the meeting with very short notice, officially because Kaczysnki had become ill. But senior Polish diplomats and opposition politicians said the real reason was a satirical article published in the German daily Taz newspaper that described the Kaczynski twins as “the Polish new potatoes.”
Anna Fotyga, Poland’s foreign minister, publicly complained to the German Foreign Ministry and demanded a formal apology. After Berlin said it would not comment since it supported freedom of the press, Fogyta said the lack of response was “shocking” and compared the article to the language used in Der Stürmer, a propaganda weekly during the Nazi era. Former foreign ministers accused the government of damaging Poland’s national interests. (IHT)
I think if this had happened during recess, the Leck or Jarek would have just smacked the editor.
Maybe that would have been less damaging for Polish foreign relations.
From The Observer:
So many young Poles are leaving to find jobs and a better life in Britain that bosses back home are desperate for them to return to keep the wheels of Polish industry turning, writes Daniel McLaughlin in Wroclaw. [...]
More than half a million Poles have moved to Britain to find jobs since Poland joined the European Union two years ago. They have fled a country with 18 per cent unemployment, the highest figure in the 25-nation bloc. But now the drain of talent has speeded up to such an extent that Poland is complaining of a drastically reduced population and the lack of a suitable workforce to help the country develop. (Source)
But why would an educated twenty-something want to return to this:
Poland is still anchored in its anti-Semitic past, says Gabriele Lasser in Berlin's die tageszietung Consider the output of Radio Maryja, one of Poland's main radio stations and virtual house organ of the governing Law and Justice Party. (Between the hymns and prayers, ministers use it to announce policy.) This Catholic station, which spews out right-wing propaganda for the benefit of its 3 million listeners, surpassed itself last month with an anti-Semitic diatribe from the pundit Stanislaw Michalkiewicz. Polish "kikes," he bellowed, have manufactured a "Holocaust industry," in order to "extort" compensation from the taxpayer for property expropriated during World War II. Poland's telecom watchdog, which recently imposed a heavy fine on another radio station for satirizing Radio Maryja and "damaging the journalistic ethic," didn't utter a peep of protest. But the comments incensed Pope Benedict, and the Vatican fired off a furious letter to Poland's bishops, demanding they stop turning a blind eye to this extremist claptrap. Benedict is due on an official visit next month. If the bishops want to avoid a spanking from the pope in person, they had better do something, and soon, about Radio's Maryja's hateful programming. (From The Week news magazine).
And now Andrzej Lepper is Agriculture Minister and Roman Giertych is Education Minister. There's already talk about "cleaning" homosexuals out of the education field...
"It could be worse," Kinga and I said when PiS (Law and Justice Party) got elected in Poland last year.
It is worse...
Now that there exists video proof that W knew before Katrina that there was a serious risk to the levees, how is he going to try to spin his way out of this?
"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."
That outright lie should make any thinking person sick.
The recent brouhaha over the war in Iraq has drawn Bush and his gang out of its shell of silence. Cheney has recently stepped into the fight:
Vice President Dick Cheney on Wednesday lashed out at Democrats who accused the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, saying such critics were spreading "one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired" in Washington.
Cheney also suggested that the Democratic attacks could undermine troop morale.
"The saddest part is that our people in uniform have been subjected to these cynical and pernicious falsehoods day in and day out," Cheney said in a speech in Washington to a conservative think tank.
"American soldiers and Marines are out there every day in dangerous conditions and desert temperatures . . . and back home a few opportunists are suggesting they were sent into battle for a lie," Cheney said. (L.A. Times)
In a sense, he has a point. If the administration did indeed admit to “selectively choosing” intelligence so as to make the war a little more attractive, would the average soldier be inclined to go back out, day after day risking his/her life? Probably not. In other words, troop morale would be affected were the charges admitted (and I’m not even saying here they’re true).
But Cheney’s claim that merely suggesting it, his claim that asking tough questions about the origins of the war affects troop morale, is absurd. It amounts to using the soldiers’ daily risks for political gain – a way of stifling the critics. Not the race card, but the soldier card.
And then he calls Democrats "opportunists."
But what choice do they have?
After all, a little honesty can go a long way. So it’s better, in the end, I suppose, to shut up and die for a lie, knowing that its for the greater good, because now that we’re involved we can’t withdraw, even though our involvement was finagled by intelligence massaging…
It’s all more convoluted than that attempt at a grammatically based illustration.
If the Bush administration has nothing to hide in this matter, why is it historically tight-lipped about everything? Why is it swinging away with such panic blows?
At Google's news site, the top two headlines currently:
Nice balance.
Relatively high voter turn-out; deaths held to double digits; dancing Iraqis.
Do they read this blog?
I stand humbly corrected.
So the Iraqi people are going to be voting in their first election. Many have pointed out the absurdity of the elections in which:
Bush is ramming this election down their throats in an attempt to legitimate his decision to invade Iraq.
No one in Baghdad is calling the shots in Iraq's surreal experiment with electoral politics.
The marching orders are coming from Washington. And after all the tragedies that Iraq has so far experienced, this continued direction from a distance promises even more tragedy and farce in the days to come (The Capital Times)
The elections don't seem to differ that much from Saddam's elections. Then, Iraqis went to the polling station to avoid retaliation from Saddam; now, Iraqis avoid the polling stations to avoid execution by the insurgents. Sunday's election will be only slightly more legitimate than those during Saddam's reign only in so far as the candidates don't all represent the same agenda. In theory. But since no one really knows who the candidates are or what the parties represent (except there's probably not any who express the _slightest_ amount of anti-US sentiment), for all the Iraqis know, they could all be voting for the same agenda, no matter whom they vote for.
Well, those that do get out and vote.
Was Bush really so blinded by his own idiocy? Did none of his advisers say, "Hey, maybe it's not such a straightforward thing as going into the country and receiving the warm thanks of the newly-liberated Iraqis." Did he really expect the Iraqis to start jumping up and down, clapping their hands like little girls, all saying in a unified voice, "We want elections!! We want elections!!"?
If Iraq were a chess game (and oh, that it were), Bush would play in the following method:
The Bush administration seems to be incapable of such analytical thinking required by chess, much less required by war. Unfortunately, the pieces Bush is shuffling around live and breathe, as in Vonnegut's short story "All the King's Horses."
Bush doesn't seem to know he's gotten the US in a no-win situation:
And the post-election reality doesn't seem so bright either:
Of course, it's not as if people weren't foreseeing this before the invasion. But Bush already had his mind up about
and so no amount of reason could talk him out of it.
But you can't reason with someone who has the mental ability of a turnip.