Online community for 
We honor our war dead this Memorial Day weekend. The greatest respect we could pay them would be to pledge no more wars for erroneous and misleading reasons; no more killing and wounding except for the defense of our country and our freedoms.
We also could honor our dead by caring for the living, and do better at it than we are right now.
Timothy Griffin, a central figure in the U.S. Attorney scandal and a protégé of Republican political guru Karl Rove, reportedly has been hired to dig up dirt on likely Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.
FirstRead, a political Web site of NBC News, cited a Republican source as confirming that Griffin was being brought onboard by the Republican National Committee to handle opposition research on Obama.
Facing a tough reelection fight in 2004, George W. Bush expressed outrage over leaked photos showing U.S. military police at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison abusing detainees, who were paraded naked before female guards, threatened by attack dogs, chained in “stress positions” and forced to wear ladies underpants on their heads.
President Bush assured the American people that he “shared a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated.” Other administration officials pinned the blame on a “few bad apples” and dismissed the prison guards’ claim that they were told to “soften up” the detainees for interrogation.
Is a government guilty of terrorism if it harbors known terrorists? What should one say about a country that permits open fund-raising on behalf of a terrorist implicated in the mass killing of civilians?
What about a government that secretly arms a guerrilla army that wantonly kills and abuses civilians while seeking to overthrow an elected government?
Dear Admiral Fallon,
I have not been able to find out how to reach you directly, so I drafted this letter in the hope it will be brought to your attention.
First, thank you for honoring the oath we commissioned officers take to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic. At the same time, you have let it be known that you do not intend to speak, on or off the record, about Iran.
But our oath has no expiration date. While you are acutely aware of the dangers of attacking Iran, you seem to be allowing an inbred reluctance to challenge the commander in chief to trump that oath, and to prevent you from letting the American people know of the catastrophe about to befall us if, as seems likely, our country attacks Iran.
Read on.Sen. John McCain says he opposes the $307 billion farm bill because it would dole out wasteful subsidies, but his chief economic adviser Phil Gramm also wants to stop its proposed regulation of energy futures trading, a market that was famously abused when Enron Corp. manipulated California’s electricity prices in 2001.
Clearing the way for that California price gouging, Gramm, as a powerful Texas senator in 2000, slipped an Enron-backed provision into the Commodities Futures Modernization Act that exempted from regulation energy trading on electronic platforms.
The irony of George W. Bush going before the Knesset and mocking the late Sen. William Borah for expressing surprise at Adolf Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland is that Bush’s own family played a much bigger role assisting the Nazis.
If Borah, an isolationist Republican from Idaho, sounded naïve saying “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided,” then what should be said about Bush’s grandfather and other members of his family providing banking and industrial assistance to the Nazis as they built their war machine in the 1930s?
If the American people should have learned one lesson from the past seven years, it is that the careless mix of tough talk and wishful thinking gets good people killed – and pushes even powerful nations to the brink of bankruptcy.
Yet, the current and possibly future Republican presidents combined these two dangerous elements on the same day: George W. Bush eschewing “appeasement” in the Middle East and John McCain offering a dreamy image of military victory in Iraq by 2013.
More than five years after the decision to invade Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein and impose democracy, nearly 160,000 U.S. soldiers remain there.
Despite the war’s growing unpopularity with Americans, President Bush is adamant about not setting an “artificial deadline” for withdrawing troops.
The Pentagon’s decision to drop war-crimes charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged “20th hijacker” in the 9/11 attacks, again underscores the consequences of the Bush administration’s descent into torture and other abusive treatment of “war on terror” detainees.
If al-Qahtani’s case had gone forward, the U.S. government would have been forced to reveal its own violations of the Geneva Convention, anti-torture statutes and the laws of war, according to lawyers representing al-Qahtani.
From the administration that used the 9/11 tragedy to violently pursue an unrelated vendetta against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, we get Round Two.
After a cyclone devastated portions of Burma (which the despotic Burmese government has renamed Myanmar) and killed an estimated 100,000 people, instead of concentrating on providing relief, the Bush administration couldn’t resist scoring points on First Lady Laura Bush’s pet issue—the tyranny of the Burmese military junta.
A senior legal adviser to the Bush-Cheney 2004 reelection campaign is working behind the scenes to help enact a Missouri state constitutional amendment that critics say would suppress the vote in the key battleground state this November by requiring voters to show proof of citizenship.
Mark “Thor” Hearne, Bush-Cheney’s national counsel in 2004 and now a partner in the St. Louis, Missouri, firm of Lathrop & Gage, has been collaborating with Missouri’s Republican state Rep. Stanley Cox, the sponsor of the constitutional amendment,Cox’s office confirmed this week.
Jimmy Carter has written a post on the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog entitled "Presidents Should Not Be Liars."
Carter states: “I do not think the President of the United States should be a liar, and believe that the overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens agree with me. For security reasons, the whole truth cannot always be revealed, but it is quite obvious that lies are seldom made to protect our nation. Almost invariably, the political fortunes of the prevaricator are at stake.”
If John McCain wins the presidency – and gets to appoint one or more U.S. Supreme Court justices – America’s 220-year experiment as a democratic Republic living under the principle that “no man is above the law” may come to an end.
To put the matter differently, if a President McCain replaces one of the moderate justices with another Samuel Alito – as McCain has vowed to do – then Justice Department lawyer John Yoo’s extreme vision of an all-powerful Executive could well become the new law of the land.
Earlier this week, the White House disclosed that it could not recover lost e-mails from emergency backup tapes for the period covering the invasion of Iraq and the U.S. failure to find Iraq’s alleged WMD.
This new gap – from March 1, 2003, to May 23, 2003 – also may have wiped out evidence of how George W. Bush and his top aides reacted to the emerging criticism from former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson that the White House had sold the war using false claims about Iraq seeking uranium from Niger in Africa.
The old politics died on May 6, 2008 as the predictable and inevitable happened and the voters said no to business as usual.
The voters said no to the most phony and fraudulent proposal in memory for a gas tax cut that would never happen, that would profit the oil companies that Senator Clinton falsely said she was fighting with it, that would do nothing for the people she falsely claimed she was helping with it.
More memos recently have surfaced that were written early in the Bush administration by John C. Yoo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel -- the man who gave us the administration's horrifyingly narrow definition of torture.
As difficult as it is to believe, the recently released memos are even scarier than the original torture memo.
Every four years, during U.S. presidential elections, the same thing happens, except it’s always a little bit different.
Some clever political operative injects “oppo” into the campaign – some little “scandal” that supposedly speaks to the “character” of a candidate – and the press corps obsesses on this marginal issue nearly to the exclusion of all substantive matters.
When I was a child, Zionism was the national liberation struggle of the Jewish people.
While the United States and all other countries -- including the Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist countries -- closed their doors to Jews seeking refuge from the murder of millions of Jews by the fascists, and while the Palestinian people's leadership used their influence with the British to ensure that Jews would not be able to settle in our ancient homeland both during and immediately after the Second World War as hundreds of thousands of survivors languished in displaced persons' camps in Europe, the Zionist movement championed the need for a state of the Jewish people with its own army and its own territory.
Last December, when I first learned via Clinton insiders that their “oppo” package would include Barack Obama’s associations with fiery black preacher Jeremiah Wright and Vietnam War-era radical William Ayers, I shrugged at what sounded to me like sub-standard fare from the dark side of American politics.
So what if someone’s minister said some stupid things or that an aging one-time student radical had lent some support to a politician’s campaign, I thought.
