Here is a banner that ought to fly from every home and business in America.
Cindy Sheehan to Be Arrested
According to a poster on Daily Kos, Cindy Sheehan, a mother whose son was killed in Iraq, has been informed that she and her group will be arrested Thursday as a "threat to national security" for protesting the war on a road near Bush’s "ranch" in Crawford, Texas. Cindy says that she and others plan to be arrested.
Sheehan has vowed to continue protesting until Bush meets with her.
Declare Victory and Bring Them Home
Politics1.com is a very useful site for political information. The politics1.com site includes pages for each state, with lists of announced and potential candidates, links to party websites and news websites for each state. Politics1.com also carries long, interesting profiles on the various political parties — not just the two major parties, but all the little parties on the right, on the left and on various tangents.
The editor of Politics1.com carries information on candidates and parties without bias , but occasionally lets his own views be known. He was enthusiastic for Howard Dean’s campaign last year, because of shared opposition to the Iraq War. Apparently he has taken a position that while the war was wrong, we are now responsible for Iraq and cannot pull out until it is safe and stable.
Today (August 5, 2005) he carried an editorial worth reading headlined:
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS … BY BRINGING THEM HOME
“Until this week, I was in the ‘You break it, you bought it’ camp…” (a position shared by Howard Dean and other mainstream “opponents” of the war.)
“We were misled into the war and never should have crossed the line that turned us into one of the bully nations that unilaterally starts so-called “pre-emptive” wars. “(This is a view that now more than half of Americans agree with, according to recent polls.)
“There is a very thin line between liberator and occupier — a line that usually gets get crossed very soon after the “victory” is declared…the distinction today between Iraqi insurgent and Iraqi citizen seems almost non-existent…”
“I fear that if we stay in Iraq another year (or another ten years), the internal situation in Iraq will remain largely unchanged — but the horrific body count will be so much higher. They obviously don’t want us there…”
His solution: “…let’s declare victory today (“The world is rid of Saddam Hussein…”), bring our soldiers home, and give them some great parades and our thanks for their sacrifice…No more American mothers should have to bury sons who died “defending” a foreign nation that doesn’t want us there. Bring ’em home. Every single American soldier. Starting today.
The Plame/AIPAC-gate Connection
Swopa cites Mark Kleimen on the AIPAC spy scandal — who points out that Larry Franklin and his cohorts are “simply charged with giving classified information to those without security clearances, in pursuit of a political agenda” — and makes the Plame-AIPAC-gate connection:
“Looking ahead to the future of Plamemania for a moment, let’s imagine the closest adviser to the President of the United States. And the chief of staff to the Vice President of the United States. Indicted for violations of the Espionage Act.
“I wonder how well they’ll be able to spin that.”
There’s another important factor that links the Plame-Rove-Libby imbroglion with the AIPAC spy scandal, underscored by the news that prosecutor Patrick J. “Bulldog” Fitzgerald is widening the investigation:
“Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed.”
Both Fitzgerald and Paul McNulty, the prosecutor in the AIPAC spy case, are targeting the same group of committed neoconservative ideologues. The neocons tried to discredit Ambassador Joe Wilson and “outed” CIA agent Valerie Plame because Wilson was an obstacle on the road to war with Iraq. And now they are trying replicate the same scenario in support a military strike at Iran — the issue at the root of the AIPAC spy scandal. In both instances, their ruthlessness and lawlessness was their ultimate undoing.
Plame-gate + AIPAC-gate = Neocon-gate.
Sit back, and enjoy …
Weekend Interviews
Saturday on the Weekend Interview Show, Jacob Hornberger from the Future of Freedom Foundation will explain the scandal surrounding the military tribunals, Greg Mitchell from Editor and Publisher will discuss the unnessessary nuking of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Japan 60 years ago and the supression of the reality of the effects, and I’ll try once more to speak with Mother Jones‘ David Enders from Iraq about the situation in Fallujah.
Update: Show’s over, archives here
Midnight Soccer
Put aside, for a moment, all the moral outrage and emotional rancor, and gaze upon the cold, dispassionate truth: whatever else interventionist war might be, there is no denying that it’s yet another gigantic government project, the kind libertarians and conservatives once instinctively ridiculed. Oh, how times change.
Jim Henley finds this passage in the CS Monitor:
- US soldiers trying to create goodwill in Fallujah echo the bitterness. “We thought we were doing something good when we built a soccer field,” says Maj. Allen Vaught. “We brought in engineers, earthmovers, welded goal posts, and trucked in some smooth dirt.”
The next day looters took everything. “Goal posts, nets, and the good dirt. How can you help people who steal dirt?” he asks incredulously.
Henley dispatches Vaught’s assumptions with a shot of Libertarianism 101 and a spoonful of the scorn that used to greet any mention of the phrase “midnight basketball.” I suggest that every time you hear about some civil-society miracle the U.S. government has authored in Iraq, whether a soccer field or a fresh coat of paint on a school, imagine that midnight basketball had been effected in this country at the cost of 25,000-100,000 dead and hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes and destroyed property.