"All the wealth will not bring back my son, but now I have to think of the future for the rest of my children," said Zubari's wife, Selma. "What will become of us?"
That is a sentiment shared by many residents of the shattered city, which remains under curfew and where pockets of fighting continue to rage. Some homes in the city have begun posting signs in both Arabic and English that read, "Family inside."
I personally agree that there may have been extenuating circumstances regarding the shooting of a wounded Iraqi guerrilla in a mosque by a marine (wounded guerrillas often lure US troops close and then blow them up). But most people aren't good at seeing both sides of the story. If guerrillas had stacked four wounded American Marines up somewhere, and then a second set of guerrillas came in, and a guerrilla shot one of the unarmed, wounded Marines in the head on camera, I guarantee you no one in the American media would be talking about extenuating circumstances. This act would be seen as cowardly and perfidious, with no need for further investigation.Those who hated us pre 9/11 had many reasons ("they hate out freedom" was not among the top 20), but the millions who have come to hate us since then have concrete reasons they see on their televisions.
Bayan Jaber of the major Shiite political party said that a week ago, five Shiites traveling to Najaf from Diyala province near the Iranian border were waylaid in the "triangle of death" and shot dead. The attackers demanded — and received — $15,000 from their families to return the bodies.Thank you George W. Bush for contributing to a free market economy in Iraq.
According to Jaber, insurgent leaders in the area offer cash bounties for killing certain kinds of people: $1,000 for a Shiite, $2,000 for a member of the Iraqi National Guard and $3,000 for an American.
WASHINGTON -- As insurgents launched counterattacks in cities following the U.S. victory in Fallujah, several administration official acknowledged that U.S. military tactics in Iraq since last April have proved ineffective in destroying guerrilla forces and have acted to weaken popular support for the new U.S.-appointed government.There's more information in that story -- read it. What an incredible disaster .
....
A senior Pentagon official complained that U.S. counterintelligence investigations designed to prevent enemy penetration of U.S. facilities had proved "pitiably inadequate."
The ability of the insurgents to penetrate U.S. intelligence was made clear in the recent massacre of 49 Iraqi soldiers who were taken from three minibuses at a fake checkpoint and then shot in the back of the head.
"That massacre would not have been possible without enemy penetration of U.S. plans," a knowledgeable U.S. official said.
....
"Things are absolutely terrible," said former CIA counterterrorism chief, Vince Cannistraro. "The insurgency is growing and spreading, and its ability to coordinate operations, the growing sophistication of those operations places us in a disaster of unprecedented proportion."
Referring to the "pin strike bombings" claimed by the administration against Zarqawi, Peter Singer, national security fellow at the Brookings Institution, called the bombings a "stop-gap measure" and "unwise."
"When I hear of an F-16 dropping a 500-pound bomb on a populated area, I cringe, because you have to know innocent people are being killed," he said.
One member of Kerry's inner circle of campaign aides said Thursday that the failure to spend the money cost the senator victory in a close election.I rearlize this is one, perhaps disgruntled insider. But, really, Kerry had fifteen million dollars or so to spend. (And that should not have been saved for a recount: Any potential recount would have used a seperate account they were raising money for, not general campaign funds. )
This morning, I read John Brummett's column about the close but likely defeat of Amendment 2 in Alabama, a proposed amendment to the state constitution which would have repealed segregation-era language included in the document back in the 1950s. The strategy of Alabama politicians back then to avoid any potential interference with their racist educational system was to amend the constitution so that it included, besides poll taxes and mandated segregation, language which denied the right to an education at taxpayer expense for any Alabama child. Thanks to federal action, poll taxes and the doctrine of separate-but-equal was rendered moot; but the rejectionist language itself remains in the constitution, and has become a branch which many of those who reject a sense of obligation to the larger (and multiracial) social unit which Alabama in fact is continue to cling to. The push for Amendment 2 was led by Governor Bob Riley, who has bravely fought for a better Alabama before, and done so on explicitly Christian grounds. But once again, the Christian Coalition of Alabama and many of their Republican allies refused to budge on their opposition. Not that they necessarily still harbor segregationist sympathies; Amendment 2's opponents insisted that the racist language in their state constitution is meaningless, and that they would introduce legislation to strip them in particular anyway.
Many social and religious conservatives in the South and West have drawn themselves away from civic responsibility, shamefully allowing archaic and otherwise rejected political strategies to provide them with a way to hide from the inequality and need that education can provide at least a partial solution to.I think those "archaic and otherwise rejected political strategies" are, sotto voce or not, bedrock tactics of Republicans, and they're a goodly part of the reason why Repubs won as much as they did recently. They're not a hiding place for their responsibility -- they believe that they are being responsible by acting this way (not so much about the racist undertones, but about much else of their policies).
FALLUJAH, Iraq — The men from Fallujah gathered on the red carpet inside their mosque to vent their anger. Instead of feeling liberated, they said the violence of the U.S. offensive to take control of their city has deepened their hatred.
These men came to collect food from U.S. and Iraqi forces at the Hadra Mohamadiya mosque, and were secretly given a swab test for recent explosives handling, something that might mark them as insurgents.
Forty-seven men were arrested as a result of the tests. These men were clean and said they were bitter.
"When you captured Saddam Hussein, I was very happy, and not fighting Americans, but you used your guns, and your military debased me," said Mahmoud al-Samarrai, who says his house was hit by U.S. airstrikes.
"I was doing amputations for many patients. But I am an orthopedic surgeon. If a patient came to me with an abdominal injury, I could do nothing," he said, eyes cast down, close to tears. "We would bring the patient in and we would have to let him die."Of course, there's more, if you have the stomach.
Electricity was cut off to the city. There was no water, no food, no fluids for the patients, Ghanim said. But the patients just kept coming.
"We were treating everyone. There were women, children, mujaheds. I don't ask someone if they are a fighter before I treat them. I just take care of them," he said.
Late Tuesday, a bomb struck one side of the makeshift medical center. Ghanim ran out.
A second bomb hit, crashing through the roof and destroying most of the facility. Ghanim believes it killed at least two of the young resident doctors working there and most of the patients.
"At that moment I wished to die," he said. "It was a catastrophe."
ChristianExodus.org is coordinating the move of thousands of Christians to South Carolina for the express purpose of re-establishing Godly, constitutional government. It is evident that the U.S. Constitution has been abandoned under our current federal system, and the efforts of Christian activism to restore our Godly republic have proven futile over the past three decades. The time has come for Christians to withdraw our consent from the current federal government and re-introduce the Christian principles once so predominant in America to a sovereign State like South Carolina.Kooks. Reminds me of the Libertartian's Free State Project.
On a lighter note, it is hard to avoid observing that al-Baghdadi castigated Bush's administration as "fundamentalist" and "right-wing." When even the Sunni Salafis of Mosul consider you too fundamentalist and right-wing, you have probably gone too far.
Arafat has a dream that he is going to die so he goes to see a medium who might be able to explain the circumstances of his death. The medium gazes into her crystal ball and declares, "You are going to die on a Jewish holiday." Arafat replies, "Which one?" The medium responds, "It doesn't matter. Whatever day you die will become a Jewish holiday."Yeah, that's a funny joke.
BAGHDAD —Iraqi insurgents have extended their reach over large swaths of the country, including sections of the capital, making it unlikely that the United States can establish the stability needed for credible elections in January even if its forces succeed in Fallouja, military and political analysts say.The rest of the piece includes a bleak tour of several hotspots around Iraq, including:
There is little doubt that American-led forces will recapture Fallouja within days, the analysts say. But U.S. officials who are planning for the election face another challenge: a law and order vacuum in many Sunni Muslim areas where there are no American or Iraqi forces and insurgents can operate with impunity.
Masked gunmen patrol these places, particularly at night, assassinating government officials, carrying out kidnappings and intimidating the people.
"There are large areas of countryside that are controlled 24 hours a day by the mujahedin, where people do not see U.S. forces," said Charles Heyman, a senior defense analyst for the London-based Jane's Defence Weekly.
Civil authority appears to have all but vanished in some areas. In Haditha and Haqlaniya, neighboring towns 135 miles west of Baghdad, people say they are afraid to walk the streets. Insurgents sent a strong warning months ago after the U.S. military put a local tribal leader in control. Militants killed him and his sons. A second group of leaders, including a police chief, was also deposed.Thank you, George W. Bush.
The current chairman of the city council, Khaled Hussein, who has the approval of the insurgents, painted a bleak picture of life in the city. He spoke about a weekend attack on two police stations in the towns, in which 22 police officers were killed. Some were handcuffed, then executed.
"Now the Iraqi police refuse to go to work. The shops are closed, the streets are empty and very few people go out," Hussein said.
The picture is reflected in other areas.
It sure looks to me as if they've been nursing a case of historical pique for more than 200 years and that resentment no longer has any more meaning than a somewhat self-destructive insistence on maintaining a cultural identity that's really defined by it's anger toward the rest of the country. They are talking themselves into a theocratic police state in order to "crack the whip over the heads of the northern men" and it's not likely to work out for them any better this time than it did the first time. The real elites in the church, the government and the corporations will take them down right along with us when that comes to pass.As someone who's from the South, I really don't know what to make of all this (I've been a Yankee for over a decade now). I'm as peeved as any other blue stater about being lectured to by people who claim I'm lecturing them while they pocket the tax money their states disproportionately suck from blue-land. I find the religious right offensive at best, scary at worst.
It tells us that the South is, to begin with, a concept and a shared one. It's an idea that people can talk about, think about, use to orient themselves and each other. People know whether they're in it or not. As a geographer would put it, the South is a "vernacular" region.Click on the map links in the linked essay-- Reed uses maps that delineate the South in different ways: where cotton can be cultivated, where kudzu grows, percentage of dentists per capita, or where the word "Dixie" appears in telephone directory listings:
Stop and think about that. Why should that be? Why can I write "South" with some assurance that you'll know I mean Richmond and don't mean Phoenix? What is it that the South's boundaries enclose?
Rove's re-election strategy was elegantly simple: Scare the bejesus out of Jesusland. Faggots are headed your way! Satanic Muslims are hiding everywhere! That's all it took to get Jesusland to do the job. Intellectual conservatives like the National Review staff are flattering themselves if they honestly believe Jesusland cares about conservative thought. The "reality-based" folks are learning that Jesusland doesn't even care about jobs or the economy.As Froomkin writes today:
Even more than terror, these people voted against gays and abortion, and for the belief that God selected Bush.
The Bush campaign super-charged the "moral minority." Exit polls showed 21 percent of voters said moral values were the most important issue -- and 78 percent of them voted for Bush. That's about 18 million Bush votes right there.
College Park, Md.: Just a comment!There's no reasoning with that, because it's faith-based, not logical. Many of them believe God picked Bush.
I'm an African-American female who is a registered democrat. I voted for George Bush, because I am also a believer in the Word of God. Although I don't agreed with a lot of decisions he made over the last four years, as a Christian his belief in God and open confession of his beliefs persuaded me to vote for him. I think you will find a lot of people voted because of morale values versus party affiliation. I think we are better off with a president who has a biblical foundation and is not a shame to admit he hears from God. With the help of God we can get through anything. Kerry didn't offer me the same assurance. Thank you for allowing me to speak.
Chat with people in line. Be upbeat. For most of human history people had to put up with unelected leaders telling them what to do, and they couldn't speak back in any meaningful way.A U.S. toll-free telephone hotline at 1-866-OUR-VOTE (1 866-687-8683) and a great set of Web sites at http://voteprotect.org and http://verifiedvoting.org, help citizens to vote and have their votes counted as intended. Voting questions and problems can be reported, tracked, and responded to by thousands of specially trained operators, attorneys, and technologists, now and beyond November 2nd.
There is also a “do-it-yourself” 24/7 incident reporting form on the Web at http://voteproblem.org, as an alternative recording method, without real-time follow-up.
The more people hear about and use the Web sites and hotline at 1-866-OUR-VOTE (1 866-687-8683), the better the world can trust U.S. elections to be
-----Original Message-----
From: Carrie Thompson [mailto:cthompson@rpof.org]
Sent: Wednesday, August 18, 2004 8:55 PM
To: Sarah Anderson [mailto:sanderson@rpof.org]
Cc: Andy Palmer [mailto:apalmer@rnchq.org]; jbennick@georgewbush.org
Subject: CSV Files
ATTACHMENTS: 
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What a wonderful party, the Republican party. The "don't let the Negroes vote" party for a new century!
