Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Dad says soldier/son's death in Iraq "was a waste"
Via AmericaBlog.com.Dad says soldier/son's death in Iraq "was a waste": "I am outraged at what I see as the cause of his death. For nearly three years, the Bush administration has pursued a policy that makes our troops sitting ducks. While Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that our policy is to 'clear, hold and build' Iraqi towns, there aren't enough troops to do that.
In our last conversation, Augie complained that the cost in lives to clear insurgents was 'less and less worth it,' because Marines have to keep coming back to clear the same places. Marine commanders in the field say the same thing. Without sufficient troops, they can't hold the towns. Augie was killed on his fifth mission to clear Haditha...."
There is more at AmericaBlog.
Five times we've had to clear out the same city? Yet Rumsfeld keeps telling us we have enough troops on the ground? Bush says we're making progress while our troops recapture the same city for the fifth time?
They've proven that they can lie the country into a war, but unfortunately, they've also proven that they don't know how to plan to fight a war, run a country, or win a war.
Bush put our soldiers into a situation where they can't win, that they didn't need to be in, and one that he now refuses to remove them from. That's criminal.
How long until this gold star father gets the Cindy Sheehan treatment from the Right wingers? How dare he have an opinion in opposition to the war criminal in chief?
Monday, January 02, 2006
Morale Watch: Checking in with Our Troops
Approval of the president’s Iraq policy fell 9 percentage points from 2004; a bare majority, 54 percent, now say they view his performance on Iraq as favorable. Support for his overall performance fell 11 points, to 60 percent, among active-duty readers
of the Military Times newspapers. Though support both for President Bush and for the war in Iraq remains significantly higher than in the public as a whole, the drop is likely to add further fuel to the heated debate over Iraq policy.
2008, where are you?
A White Jesus or Black Santa?
Black Santa Claus draws slurs Downstate
Vandals on Friday stole the Santa and spray-painted a death threat and racial slur on the home of William Glass. Last week, someone tied a noose around the Santa's neck and hung it from a tree.
The depressing part about this is that the people doing this probably consider themselves to be Christians.
Cheney, The Corrupt Bug Sprayer (in Delay's Terminology)
Back in your bug spraying days, had you been caught releasing critters into restaurants as a strategy to win additional fumigating business, you would have been fired, correct? It's clearly a conflict of interest to profit from the problem you were responsible for creating in the first place.
Wouldn't the same thing apply to Vice President Cheney's relationship with Halliburton? If he takes the United States to war with a country that posed no imminent threat to our country, destroys the other country, then profits from the restoration of the country he destroyed, it's he really just a corrupt bug sprayer?
While the scale is clearly different, don't the same rules apply to both situations?
-Ed Kohler
Gay Bashing is on the Wrong Side of History
Gay marriage foes lose ground
Laura Billings addressed the remarkable turn of events that occurred this month in Great Britain ("Across the pond, oddly, gay unions are the law," Dec. 22). Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England now permit civil partnerships granting some of the same financial benefits to same-sex couples as married heterosexual couples. The four follow five countries where same-sex marriages were already the law of the land, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, Canada and, recently, South Africa.
She failed, however, to draw the self-evident conclusion that those who are promoting an amendment to the Minnesota Constitution defining marriage as only a union of one man and one woman are on the wrong side of history.
ED KOHLER
St. Paul
"The wrong side of history," is a good way to explain it. John Aravosis of Americablog.com came up with a similar explanation for why religious bigots are really shooting themselves in the foot when they discriminate in the name of their religion: I've said for a while now that the reason we win these battles is because each of these battles start as "culture wars" and end as "civil rights."
I find it both interesting and sad to watch people discriminate against other people based on outdated religious doctrine. It's both sad and interesting to me because I can't figure out how a religious person can find such material to grasp out of all God's teachings. Maybe a gay basher can help explain it? Step right up.
