Category: politics

This made me laugh out loud. It’s allegedly written by John Cleese, but it turns out that it originally came from Satirewire.

(more…)

Yesterday, I marched through Hollywood with my mom, her friend, and about 100,000 other people. We raised our fists and joined our voice to millions of other voices around the world. We sent a clear message to the Bush administration: This is just the beginning. We will stop your war machine. Your policies endanger America, and enrage the world.
I hope you are paying attention, Mr. Bush. The masses are speaking — the world is speaking — and we are rebuking you, your plutocracy, and everything you represent. Your time is over, Mr. Bush. The Supreme Court can not silence the voice of the world, as it silenced the voice of the American people. It is time for you to fade into history.
I hope that those who politically oppose Mr. Bush are also paying attention. There is a minority, on the cusp of becoming a majority, who are anxiously awaiting your leadership. Rise to the challenge, and give us representation in our government. Greens? Libertarians? Democrats? Who will represent the people? This is your moment. Do not squander it.
Peace.
UPDATE: Thank you, Senator Byrd.
UPDATE: I understand the visceral reactions that come when reading a post like this. If you’d like to comment or discuss, you are welcome to go to the Soapbox.

Today is Veteran’s day, and I’ve been trying to think of a way to thank and honor those men and women who have ensured that I can sit here, safe and warm in my house, and proclaim, “George W. Bush is a Jerkass.”
Well, I have a friend, and she and her husband are both veterans. She wrote the following, and reprinting it here is the best tribute to Veterans, and the best way of saying thank you that I can think of.

This weekend, with Veteran’s Day coming up, a friend asked me “What are some things about people serving in the US military that you think we civilians under-appreciate or don’t understand?”
It was a tough question. On Veteran’s Day, it’s not only about those who have died, but those who have served and sacrificed and come away forever changed.
The military is really a separate culture within American culture. When we’d talk about “civilians,” it was almost like talking about a different species. How can someone understand, truly understand “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die” without living in that culture?
Before joining the military, I’d hear on the news “40 US troops were killed in today’s bombing of such-and-such” and think, “Gee, that’s sad.” But you know, in a way, it was just numbers. After joining the military, the word “troops” took on a whole new meaning. “Troops” meant me. My husband. My friends. My brothers and sisters. It meant loving, caring, intelligent, funny human beings were dead or injured.
When CNN would report, “The US has deployed several thousand troops to somewhere,” it meant that mothers were being sent away from their children. Sons were being sent away from their parents. Families and friends and lovers were being separated, never knowing if they’d ever see each other again.
Some of them WOULD never see each other again. Would never be able to get
that one last hug, a last kiss, hear a word of kindness or forgiveness. Yet these troops went willingly into that uncertainty.
When you hear “troops,” when any civilian hears “troops,” what does it mean to you? It’s such a sanitized word.
Another thing I wonder if civilians understand is this: service is often boring. Really boring. Running preventive maintenance checks on vehicles and equipment in the hot North Carolina sun at Fort Bragg. Sitting in a tent in a field in Korea in 10-degree weather waiting for aircraft to land. Driving through the desert in Saudi Arabia where everything looks the same on your way to your camp. Sitting in a foxhole in Panama in the rain, watching. Constantly going over common task training: how to treat a sucking chest wound. How to get your protective mask on as quickly as possible. How to disassemble and reassemble your M-16. Over and over.
Preparing, trying to stay prepared.
How boring is it? Someone sent a box of romance novels to my old unit when they were in Saudi. The guys in the unit snapped ’em up to read faster than the women did.
No one talks much about the sitting around part.
The “troops” are people. They do wacky things too. Some of the guys in Saudi were going through magazine ads, writing to every company they could find saying, “We’re in the Persian Gulf. Could you send us a sample of X?” Some companies sent samples — and a few of the tents got their own pink lawn flamingoes and artificial raccoons.
There’s also some adrenalin rushes like when you get caught in an Anti-American riot in Seoul or run into an area marked with signs for chemical attack in the Saudi desert. Or get shot at.
Or have to shoot back.
In the back of your mind is this: you could die. You could lose an arm or a leg. You could die in a training accident. You try to keep this very, very far back in your mind.
But I think it’s always there.
Probably most importantly, and most difficult, is you have to trust in the chain of command that they will not use you poorly. You’ve taken an oath of service to your country, and you must trust that the orders you receive will allow you to be of service in some positive manner. I hear people say all the time, “If I were in the military, I would never have gone to Saudi” or “I would never have done those kinds of things they did in Vietnam/WWII/etc.” Truth is, maybe they wouldn’t — but they probably would.
Or they wouldn’t be in the military.
Because that trust is essential, even with the training we have in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and what constitutes an “illegal order.” You go where you’re deployed. You bomb the targets you’re supposed to bomb. You place the Claymore mines “front towards enemy” and you trust, you hope, it’s for a greater good.
You must live with it if, later, you find that there was little to no positive effect from your actions. Think of finding a baby bird and putting it back into its nest, after which the mother rejects it and it dies. You were trying to help, but nothing good came of it. Now imagine being involved in a military action where, at the end, nothing of significance has changed.
Military service changes you forever, even if you serve only a 4-year term in peacetime. You’ll never get those years back. Never.
And through all this, you know that civilians don’t much care about you. Not really. Oh, perhaps they’ll come out on Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day, maybe lay out some flowers, wear a ribbon, but most will just see it as a day off from work.
Still we serve. We serve because the Constitution of the United States promises something good and true. We serve so that opposing viewpoints can take the stage, or the microphone, and protest actions they feel are unjust. We serve for ourselves, for our families, for our future. We serve for a variety of reasons, some selfish and some pure, in the hopes that something positive will come of it. On Veteran’s Day, I would wish that everyone would remember and think of the men and women who have served in the past and who serve today, and honor their humanity. The laughter, the tears, the love, the pride in a new baby, the intelligence, insight, and humor that is part of all of us. I wish people would take one moment to think of that girl in a tent somewhere in the desert, or that
guy in a foxhole in the jungle, and understand that it could be your daughter, your son, your wife, your husband.
Instead, I fear that when they hear “25 troops were killed in some foreign country today,” they won’t bat an eye.
It was just “troops.”
Of all it means to be a veteran, perhaps that may be the hardest thing of
all.

I don’t support the resolution that congress just passed. I don’t support the Bush administration’s obsession with Oil^H^H^HIraq, and I think it gives way too much power to the president.
So I wrote my senators (my US Rep is a hardline Republican so I didn’t bother) and I asked them to please oppose the vote.
Boxer voted no, Feinstein voted yes.
I was very upset with Feinstein’s yes vote…but after reading this from her, I am absolutely apoplectic.

“I serve as the senior senator from California, representing 35 million people. That is a formidable task. People have weighed in by the tens of thousands. If I were just to cast a representative vote based on those who have voiced their opinions with my office — and with no other factors — I would have to vote against this resolution

Yeah.
If she’d, oh, respected the wishes of her constituents, and *gasp* represented> us, she’d have to vote no.
If she’d listened to those pesky voters who put her into office so that she’d carry out our wishes in this silly representative republic we have here.
But there are these mysterious “other factors” that she speaks of, right? Maybe she knows something that we don’t, because she refers to herself as

“…a member of the Intelligence Committee, as someone who has read and discussed and studied the history of Iraq…

Well, that’s pretty compelling stuff, isn’t it? I know that after a year of nebulous warnings I’ve certainly learned to be afraid of my own shadow and turn to my big government to protect me…maybe she’s onto something there, and we shouldn’t mobilze the entire state to throw her out for failing to cast a representative vote based on those who have voiced their opinions with her office.
But there’s this other guy, you see, who ]co-chairs the same committee, and who is privy to the same information. His name is Senator Bob Graham, and he’s a Florida Democrat who disagrees with Feinstein:

Iraq is ”the wrong target” in the war on terrorism, Graham said in an impassioned speech moments before the Senate early Friday gave President Bush sweeping powers to attack Iraq. The Senate overwhelmingly approved the resolution, 77-23, with Graham among the “nays.”
”I predict we will live to regret this day,” declared Graham, who is co-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and privy to a gamut of classified information on global terrorism. Graham said it would be ”irresponsible” to go to war with Iraq before confronting more imminent terrorist threats to the United States.

Surely he can’t be serious! Isn’t he privy to the same information that Feinstein has? Maybe he’s paying more attention to the report from the CIA:

Then there is the awkward matter of the CIA report on Iraq released last week, which concluded that U.N. inspections actually worked before they were halted in 1998, leaving Saddam’s military and his chemical-weapons program weaker than they were in the 1980s.
In other words, the head of American intelligence and a top military man don’t think Saddam is planning terrorist attacks against the U.S. now, but might if he was convinced we were coming in after his head. And the CIA says that Saddam’s military machine poses less of a threat to the U.S. than it did a decade ago.

Boy, it sure seems that anyone who doesn’t have something to gain politically is telling us all that the war against Iraq is at best unnecessary, and at worst A Very Bad Idea(tm).
Dianne Feinstein may not be “against us” by the Bush administration’s definition, but she’s certainly against the wishes of her constituents, and is therefore unfit to represent us in the future.
I’ll be thinking about this in November 2006.
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Sources:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2002/10/11/senate_iraq/print.html
http://www.miami.com/mld/miami/4266351.htm
http://www.salon.com/news/col/scheer/2002/10/09/cia/print.html
http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2002/10/10/intelligence/print.html