Common Sense Democracy

It sounds like a combination of all three to me. It’s one more piece of evidence that the Bushies really did expect a cakewalk in Iraq and didn’t bother planning for additional casualties. Then, when it became impossible to ignore the truth any longer, they stalled, afraid to tacitly produce an estimate for future casualties that conflicted with their rosy public message that things were getting better all the time. Finally, a couple of months ago, they ran out of options.
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The Bush administration disclosed yesterday that it had vastly underestimated the number of service personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan seeking medical treatment from the Department of Veterans Affairs, and warned that the health care programs will be short at least $2.6 billion next year unless Congress approves additional funds.

This was an issue during the election but nobody was paying attention because most people don’t react in this country until it’s a catastrophe. In the election, the number of veterans and the problems facing the VA were “out of sight – out of mind”. We have failed our military for years while continuing to send them off to die for us. Both Democrats and Republicans alike should be ashamed of themselves. So far this administration has screwed those who defend us and the seniors – the elders who came before us.

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President Bush is scheduled to give a speech tonight in which, despite the chaos and car bombs and rising daily attacks by insurgents, he’ll argue that everything is going well in Iraq and we should stay the course. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel said, “It’s like they’re just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we’re losing in Iraq.” What do you think? Are we responsible for staying the course no matter the cost or have we done what we initially set out to do and it’s now time to pull out?

Here are some resources to learn more:

“Bush Shifts Focus to Iraq,” Associated Press, June 16, 2005
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/06/16/bush.ap/

“Bush’s Support on Major Issues Tumbles in Poll,” The New York Times, June 17, 2005.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/politics/17poll.html

“N.C. congressmen supports timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.” Associated Press, June 12, 2005.
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=759

Technorati Tags : Senator+Hagel, Presidential+Speeches, Iraq, Republicans, Democrats

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The “Spirit of Justice” and the “Majesty of Justice,” which loom over the stage in the Great Hall, were blocked from view by curtains installed by the department in January 2002, when former Attorney General John Ashcroft was in office.

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The curtains were quietly removed on Friday after a decision by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Justice Department spokesman Kevin Madden said.

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Via Yahoo! News.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the government can take a person’s home or business for new development projects.

By a 5-4 vote, the high court upheld as constitutional the taking by New London, Connecticut of 15 properties belonging to nine residents or investment owners for a project to complement a nearby research facility by the Pfizer Inc. drug company.

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Stevens upheld the city’s plan under the U.S. Constitution, which allows the government to take private property through its so-called eminent domain powers in exchange for just compensation.

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Conner wrote, “Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.”

I suppose historically, this isn’t a new policy of our government; they’ve been pushing people off private lands since the pilgrims first landed on Plymouth Rock. It does seem, however that in this day and age, and given our country’s rich tradition of the American dream and owning land, individual rights would prevail in the face of big business, power and influence.

If you can’t feel safe and secure and proud in the home you’ve worked for and earned for your family, what do you really have as an American. Our rights seem so temporary when the government collectively swings it’s might.

Makes me think back on John Steinbeck’s novel, “The Grapes of Wrath” (novel, movie). We have not come very far.

Read the full article at Yahoo! News.

Technorati Tags: Supreme+Court, eminent+domain, constitution, land+ownership, Pfizer, New+London, Justice+Sandra+Day+O’Conner, government, John+Steinbeck, The+Grapes+of+Wrath

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Blogwatch Via Proceed at your own risk: WHILE ROME BURNS….

“If the flag needs protection at all, it needs protection from members of Congress who value the symbol more than the freedoms that the flag represents.”

Technorati Tags: flag+burning, american+flag, congress, constitutional+amendment

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Via CNN.com.

The House on Wednesday approved a constitutional amendment that would give Congress the power to ban desecration of the American flag, a measure that for the first time stands a chance of passing the Senate as well.

I’m an Army veteran and loyal patriot so I am, of course opposed to burning the American flag. I was in the Military Police company in our Corps of Cadets in college and my unit was responsible for raising and lowering the flags on campus 365 days a year. We were the guardians of the flag and flag etiquette. That being said, however, I have also found myself on the side of the argument that allows people to freely express themselves however they choose, which includes their right to burn the flag in opposition to the people who wave it. The whole reason I served in our military was to protect free speech, our democracy and the rights of all Americans. We can’t have a culture where you are free to support the institutions of America all you want but it’s illegal to protest them. That’s called Communism.

Something about the image of seeing police officers wrestle an American citizen to the ground as he burns a flag in protest just makes me think of the Middle East.

We all practice our freedom individually.

Read the entire article at CNN.com.

Technorati Tags: flag+burning, constitutional+amendment, flag, American+flag, patriotism, Congress

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A post at Proceed at your own risk: SCHINDLERS AND THE BUSH BROTHERS: ENEMIES OF MARRIAGE?.

How ironic is it that this horrific attack on the bonds of holy matrimony comes from the very people who almost daily claim to be the ones who are protecting the institution of marriage from such things as two same sex people in love who want to get married and raise a family. I suppose this inconsistency and hypocrisy is cut from the same cloth that has our President fighting stem cell research while at the same time authorizing the slaughter of innocents and our own troops in Iraq?

Shame on the Schindlers. Shame on Jeb Bush.

Well said.

Technorati Tags: Michael+Schiavo, Schindlers, Marriage, religious+right, Terry+Schiavo

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Via CNN.com.

“The House voted Wednesday to block the FBI and the Justice Department from using the Patriot Act to search library and book store records.”

Members voted 238 to 187 to block part of the law.

Read more at Via CNN.com.

Technorati Tags: Patriot Act, Anti-terrorism, Veto, terrorism, Congress, FBI, Justic Department, library records

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Pictures like this make you wonder who is doing the editing at these news agencies. I think they select and publish pictures intentionally to convey a certain image of the man. It’s not a very flattering picture and clearly the editors are not fans of G.W. and his policies. If I were G.W. I would not be making hand gestures that are even remotely similar to this one especially while at a republican fundraiser.

Photo from Yahoo! News & Reuters.

Technorati Tags: President Bush, Republican, Yahoo News, George Bush

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Via CNN.com

Bloggers in China using the new blogging service, MSN Spaces, by Microsoft are being censored by the Chinese government.

Users of the MSN Spaces section of Microsoft Corp.’s new China-based Web portal get a scolding message each time they input words deemed taboo by the communist authorities — such as democracy, freedom and human rights.

“Prohibited language in text, please delete,” the message says.

I find it both strange and amazing that companies like Microsoft can conduct business operations in countries that are so oppressive. I’m not blaming Microsoft, I just think that it’s strange in this day and age to have governments such as China trying to advance it’s culture through technology and capitalism and yet behave so primitively. It’s like building a 2 million dollar house, furnishing it with the best furniture money can buy but not allowing anyone to sit on it or use it.

As if not allowing people to say “democracy” will somehow make it not exist or make them less eager to have it.

Via CNN.com

Technorati Tags: China, democracy, MSN spaces, Microsoft, blogs, censorship, human rights, Chinese Government

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I’m citing the post of another blog today but it’s a good read and I enjoy passing along bits of information that I think are worthy of a good discussion. The Blogging of the President has posted an interesting blurb on the history of Presidential impeachments in our country. 9 Presidents have had impeachment charges filed. Every President since Nixon, with the exception of Carter and Ford has run into.

The premise behind the post is that in almost every case of impeachment being brought against a President, it was for purely political purposes, thereby “contradicting that assertion that misleading the nation into war isn’t grounds for impeachment.”

Read the entire post at The Blogging of the President.

Technorati Tags: impeachment, Presidential impeachment, republican, democrat, Bush

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The Washington Monthly Political Animal posted a blog entry in follow-up to the story of Billy Ray Johnson of Texas, a 42-year-old mentally retarted black man who was beaten and then dumped on the side of the road on a mound of stinging fire ants. What caught me as surprising with this particular post was not so much the story itself but rather the reaction to it by people commenting on the blog. Most of the reaction is to a comment made by the town’s mayor,

The town’s mayor says none of this was racially motivated. “The black boy was somewhere he shouldn’t have been,” he told the Chicago Tribune, “although they brought him out there.”

Just the mere fact that the mayor chose the words, “the black boy” to describe a 42 year old black man, makes me wonder if there is anything that goes on in Linden Texas that isn’t racially motivated. “The black boy” just reeks with good ol’boy racism and supremacist language. That’s not an opinion or a position on the issue, that’s just fact. I think stories like this are clearly race motivated and I don’t know why the argument has to turn to politics and whether republicans or democrats have the right to declare it as such. As one commenter points out, it’s about human decency not politics.

Browse through the comments, some of them are quite disturbing. The optimist in me thinks that maybe some of these people are just posting to cause a stir and get people enraged but I think that the reality here is that there really are sick people out there who can rationalize stories like this in their own mind and not give it a second thought, like the mayor, who seems to think it’s not about the tragedy, it’s that the black boy was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Does that somehow justify the actions of the “white boys”?

Read the full post at Political Animal.

Technorati Tags: racism, discrimination, minorities, media, liberal, conservative

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Here are a couple of interesting graphics I ran across on bopnews.com. The first one shows the counties that voted for Kerry in the last election. The second image in red shows those counties that voted for Bush. It’s an interesting cultural separation. Almost without exception, the country is divided into distinct regions: rural country versus major metropolitan cities, religous belts versus areas of cultural diversity, major universities and top educational regions versus lower education, technology, research and top medical centers versus blue collar industrial and farm regions.

More on Archipeligo.

More on Bushistan.

Via The Bloggin of the President: bopnews.com.
Technorati Tags: John Kerry, George Bush, 2004 election, voters, voter turnout, election results, presidential election

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Blogs and Google Adsense go hand-in-hand. In case you’re not familiar with Google Adsense, it’s the advertising program sponsored by Google that allows site owners to put those little ad boxes along the margins, headers and footers of websites. Webmasters earn revenue from the clicks on the ad links. The type of ads that appear on a site depend on the content of the page and Google’s technology serves up ads that it thinks are relevant to the topic of the page based on various keywords and phrases. Most site owners use Adsense as a way to defer costs of maintaining the site (as is the case with Common Sense Democracy). One of things I find quite amusing is to watch the types of ads that are being served to my sites change based on what I’m blogging about that week. This brings me to the point of this post. This week the story broke on the Watergate’s “Deep Throat” and I posted several references to the news with various links to other sources. Shortly after, the Google Adsense ads stopped appearing on the home page of this site. This is not unusual, as occassionally the druids over at Google play with the algorithms that cause blips across the universe. What is unusual is the lengh of time the ads have not appeared. Digging deeping into other pages, I realized that the ads are showing in other areas, which rules out the argument that Common Sense Democracy was being somehow blocked or reindexed in it’s entirety. One conclusion I came up with was that Google just simply didn’t like the term “Deep Throat”. Perhaps their engines have determined this term to be profanity and so the ads are filtered on any page referencing this content.

Anyway, it’s just a theory. I’d be interested to hear from anyone else who has experienced this phenomenon.

Technorati Tags: Google, adsense, Google Adsense, deep throat, blog, profanity, search engine marketing

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The number one book on the New York Times best sellers list is
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

It’s rated 4 out of 5 stars at Amazon.com, where you can read more reviews.
Technorati Tags: best sellers, books, Amazon.com, New York Times

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Via Political Animal.
Bob Woodward tells the story of how his relationship with Deep Throat, Mark Felt, came to be. The article appeared in today’s Washington Post. How Mark Felt Became ‘Deep Throat’.

Technorati Tags: deep throat, Bob Woodward, Watergate

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