This Can't Be Happening!

How stupid does little Bush think we are?

The answer is: pretty damned stupid.

That’s the only conclusion possible after hearing him try to claim that the winding down of his “surge” escalation of 30,000 additional troops represents a “new” strategy of reducing American troops in Iraq.

I mean, WTF? It was called a “surge” because it was supposed to only last a few months. And it’s ending because when the deployment period of those soldiers and marines is up, not because it was a success, but because there are no more troops to replace them!

Nobody should fall for a story that those six (yeah, it was first reported as five, but now the original military whistleblowers have told Army Times it was six) nuclear-tipped cruise missiles that were flown in launch position on a B-52 from Minot, ND to Barksdale, LA, were put on there inadvertently.

There’s something definitely screwy about the August 30 incident in which a B-52 bomber flew from Minot AFB in North Dakota to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana carrying five fully armed Advanced Cruise Missiles, each equipped with nuclear bombs capable of exploding at anything from 5 kilotons to 150 kilotons.

The government has been quick to say that the flight, which violated a number of long-standing orders regarding shipment of nuclear weapons in US airspace, was a “mistake.”

But was it a mistake?

The Iraq War has been lost.

The British are acknowledging this fact by pulling out their troops from Basra, Iraq’s second largest city, handing over the city to the control of Shia militias. For all intents and purposes, the “Coalition of the Willing” is now dead. America is now going it alone.

Bush is not acknowledging defeat, but has indirectly admitted it by saying that some troops can start being brought home soon, even though clearly nothing has been accomplished with the addition of 30,000 troops for the last six months.

(From The Nation magazine online)

Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Space Flight Center are up in arms over a new requirement by NASA that they submit to detailed FBI scrutiny of their backgrounds in order to obtain clearance to go to work. They are claiming that the agency may be trying to control or silence them about issues like global warming.

With the Bush administration clearly pushing for war with Iran, as crazy as that would be, not just for an already over-extended, burned out military, but because of the havoc it would wreak on the global economy, it is time to call attention to a few points that are being ignored.

First of all, even US intelligence experts were saying only last year that Iran was at least 10 years away from having a bomb, so the alarmist claims being made by Bush and his gang, echoing the nonsense we heard in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, about the threat of nuclear holocaust, are simply scare tactics and should fool nobody.

Let’s be clear. Alberto Gonzales is resigning as attorney general not because he’s become an embarrassment to the Bush administration—which has repeatedly shown itself to be beyond embarrassment—but because he is no longer useful. Exposed as a serial liar and an administration hack, he can no longer be relied upon by the Bush administration to carry forward its criminal agenda of subverting the Constitution, the electoral process and the Bill of Rights, because his every step is being watched by the public and the Congress.

According to a new Associated Press report, the US is offering Israel a record $30-billion 10-year military aid package.

Let's ignore for a moment the AP story's irony-free comment that "Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns said the package was meant to back peace-seeking countries like Israel and moderate Arab states in the region to counter U.S. adversaries such as Iran." (Israel is a "peace-seeking" country?) We'll just focus on the amount of money that's being promised here.

It's not just the Constitution that's suffering because of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's nutty and unprincipled "impeachment-off-the-table" position blocking any effort to impeach President Bush or Vice President Cheney for their many crimes and abuses of power.

Her position on impeachment is killing the Democratic Party too, by driving away not just progressived members of the party, but independents who voted for Democrats last November expecting some action in defense of the Constitution.