Tax-cut & Spend!

The Senate voted 53-42 to raise the debt ceiling to $9.815 trillion, the fifth increase in the U.S. credit limit since President George W. Bush took office in January 2001. The U.S. House of Representatives approved the higher debt limit earlier this year as part of the overall budget resolution and the legislation now goes to Bush for his signature. ...

More Iraqi Autonomy

US Senate votes to divide Iraq ...

Gung-Ho

The House panel said Blackwater took on the Fallujah mission before its contract had officially started and ignored warnings about the risks of entering a known insurgent stronghold. ...

No question they were getting the contract?

Hunting we will go

A Pentagon group has encouraged some U.S. military snipers in Iraq to target suspected insurgents by scattering pieces of "bait," such as detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition, and then killing Iraqis who pick up the items, according to military court documents. ...

Hold the Sugar-Coating

The Bush-Cheney administration has surrendered much of Afghanistan to the Taliban and much of Pakistan to al-Qaida. They have turned most of Iraq over to Iran, creating the very danger over which they now threaten another disastrous war; they have strained the U.S. Armed Forces to the point of exhaustion, turned the Defense Department over to private contractors, the Justice Department over to the Republican National Committee, and the national debt over to foreign creditors, while leading a party whose single most basic belief is supposed to be that individuals must take personal responsibility for their actions. And they dare to lecture us on national security? ...

200 Billion!

Bush plans to increase his request to nearly $200 billion. The troop buildup and new gear are the main reasons ...

That's approximately $700 for each and every US citizen next year. Each and every man, woman and child ...

Autonomy?

Blackwater resuming operations in Iraq ...

More Progress

Crude oil jumps above $84 ...

More Progress?

Iraqi police colonel assassinated near home ...

The Real Iranian Threat?

Iran asked Japan to pay for its oil purchases in Japanese Yen ...

Black Gold

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he says.

More Progress?

Civilian toll in Iraq may top 1M (million) ...

Ordinary


…if the President means by ordinary lives families essentially living locked up in their homes in almost perpetual darkness, without refrigeration or perhaps constantly struggling for ever more expensive gas to run generators, if he means waiting in their homes wondering if government death squads will drag them off and torture them and execute them, if he means living in sectarian cleansed neighborhoods where people who were your friends have had to flee, if he’s talking about living in communities that are protected by militias, then yeah, life’s returned to ordinary. ...

Support the Troops

Monday: 13 GIs, 77 Iraqis Killed; 132 Iraqis Wounded

and no mention of this progress in the main stream media ?

More Progress

Monday: 8 GIs, 56 Iraqis Killed; 77 Iraqis Wounded ...

Out of Touch

Officials say job fall won't stall economy ...

More Progress

Friday: 7 GIs, 1 Briton, 9 Iraqis Killed; 7 Iraqis Wounded ...

Economy/Jobs ...

8 more U.S. soldiers die in Iraq

...

Winning hearts and minds

Australian police warn of riot over Bush visit ...

Money for war, but can't feed the poor


The Democrats should point out the fact that Mister Bush is requesting an additional $50 billion for a war that is long-ago lost, but that he refuses to allow health care for America's poorest children ... a plan that would cost less than $10 billion. Maybe the weak-kneed Democrats could remind the country that New Orleans, two years on, is still a complete mess. Perhaps, Congressional Democrats, during the war-funding vote, could play a video loop of New York City's steam pipe blowing a crater in the street. Here's a thought ... the Democrats could adorn the House and Senate chambers with pictures of the collapsed bridge in Minneapolis. ...

Progress Report II

And General Petraeus’s history also suggests that he is much more of a political, and indeed partisan, animal than his press would have you believe. In particular, six weeks before the 2004 presidential election, General Petraeus published an op-ed article in The Washington Post in which he claimed - wrongly, of course - that there had been “tangible progress” in Iraq, and that “momentum has gathered in recent months.”

Is it normal for serving military officers to publish articles just before an election that clearly help an incumbent’s campaign? I don’t think so.

So here we go again. It appears that many influential people in this country have learned nothing from the last five years. And those who cannot learn from history are, indeed, doomed to repeat it. ...

Mission Accomplised II

Securing our Borders?

The Bush administration can go ahead with a pilot program to allow as many as 100 Mexican trucking companies to freely haul their cargo anywhere within the U.S. for the next year, a federal appeals court ruled Friday. ...

Shoplifting 2008

And isn’t it interesting how some of the very same people who so strongly insisted that it was Al Gore’s patriotic duty to give up rather than risk a constitutional crisis in election 2000, are perfectly happy to risk a much bigger one this time around when they think it might work to their advantage.

GOP — hypocrisy is thy name ...