be the change you want to see in the world

Obama’s first major gaffe…it is true, but it certainly doesn’t help him. Unless, of course, he’s looking for a way to explain his upcoming loss in Penn. in advance.

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

It is the second paragraph, spoken to an audience in San Francisco, that will get him into trouble. He just lost a lot of voters who might have been inching toward him in the poor, white underclass…

3 Trillion US dollars - an incalculable opportunity to do good lost forever. More than half a million Iraqis dead who would be alive today had the US not invaded. 4000 US soldiers dead and rising. An entire country’s infrastructure razed. Tens of thousands of US soldiers severely maimed. Hundreds of thousands of US soldiers put in harm’s way for a lie - a lie repeated bald-faced below. They were never there. Never there.

Quote of the week goes to Glen Greenwald on Salon.com. Bush, Cheney, et al are now being drowned in a mountain of evidence of serious crimes against the American people, and against international laws and conventions.

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to “domestic military operations” within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits.

Yet, no one is willing to adjust the course of US history toward the necessary path of re-affirming the basic lawfulness of the United States, its leadership and its people by charging anyone with a crime.

In other words, America is apparently entering into overt fascism with the full complicity of the news media, who have ignored recent blockbuster stories that expose the US administrations crimes. When this occurs, fascist leaders are empowered to take further steps. Greenwald compellingly summarizes this, albeit without using the “f” word:

Every day, it becomes more difficult to blame George Bush, Dick Cheney and comrades for their seven years (and counting) of crimes, corruption and destruction of our political values. Think about it this way: if you were a high government official and watched as — all in a couple of weeks time — it is revealed, right out in the open, that you suspended the Fourth Amendment, authorized torture, proclaimed yourself empowered to break the law, and sent the nation’s top law enforcement officer to lie blatantly about how and why the 9/11 attacks happened so that you could acquire still more unchecked spying power and get rid of lawsuits that would expose what you did, and the political press in this country basically ignored all of that and blathered on about Obama’s bowling score and how he eats chocolate, wouldn’t you also conclude that you could do anything you want, without limits, and know there will be no consequences? What would be the incentive to stop doing all of that?

Obama gets away with equating Hillary with pro-slavery forces in US history.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

It is so funny. If Hillary had planted such an obvious subliminal, such an obvious frame for a speech, she would be crucified. Overall, it is a really good speech. not a great speech all of Obama’s supporters are saying, but a good speech. Strategically he needed to do it to try to make another story to bury the one about his reverend. A bold gambit.

We knew this already, but…

After reviewing hundreds of thousands of captured Iraqi documents, a Pentagon-sponsored review has found no evidence of operational links between Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terror network, a McClatchy article reports.

The “exhaustive” study found that Saddam Hussein did provide some support to other terrorist groups but, as Warren Strobel writes for McClatchy, “his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.”

Strobel reiterates that the new study “found no documents indicating a ‘direct operational link’ between Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion,” according to an unnamed US official. The study is due to Congress and for general release by midweek.

Is there anyone who thinks Iraq is better off now? If there are, what are they smoking? Well, the Kurds do smoke a lot, but…If the US had not

• spent half-a-trilion dollars and counting on a war
• sacrificed thousands of US soldier’s lives and wounded their families
• sacrificed tens of thousands of US soldiers’ health and well-being
• directly caused the death of as many as half a million Iraqi civilians
• created a magnet for al queda to gather and organize
• potentially handed over Iraq to the fundamentalist Shia muslims
• destroyed the once-modern and admirable infrastructure of Iraq

What if they had not done those things? I challenge anyone to make an argumant that the situation would be worse than it is now, and if there is any doubt in your mind, rent and watch Iraq in Fragments.

UPDATE: The Bush Administration apparently does not want a U.S. military study that found no direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda to get any attention. This morning, the Pentagon cancelled plans to send out a press release announcing the report’s release and will no longer make the report available online.
The report was to be posted on the Joint Forces Command website this afternoon, followed by a background briefing with the authors. No more. The report will be made available only to those who ask for it, and it will be sent via U.S. mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia.