Iraq Study Group

Pullback of Combat Troops...

It appears to me the sceptical person involved in the deliberations probably has it right.   Things are changing minute by minute now.


al-Maliki not showing up at King George's request.   al-Sadr holding political talks with Christians and Sunni's.   Everybody has their own ideas as to what is going to be done but amazingly nobody is paying attention to what the Iraqi want done.


The rethoric has been flying for months for the Iraqi to stand up...   Well, I think they just maybe are fixin' to do just that.   With things changing so fast it makes this much daunted Iraq Study Group an exercise in futility...   - fc

Iraq Panel to Recommend Pullback of Combat Troops

By David E. Sanger and David S. Cloud

Published: November 30, 2006



WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 - The bipartisan Iraq Study Group reached a consensus on Wednesday on a final report that will call for a gradual pullback of the 15 American combat brigades now in Iraq but stop short of setting a firm timetable for their withdrawal, according to people familiar with the panel’s deliberations.



The report leaves unstated whether the 15 combat brigades that are the bulk of American fighting forces in Iraq would be brought home, or simply pulled back to bases in Iraq or in neighboring countries.



"I think we've played a constructive role," one person involved in the committee's deliberations said, "but from the beginning, we've worried that this entire agenda could be swept away by events."



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Judge Says No To Bush

No authority to designate groups as terrorists...

When I first started blogging in Dec 2004 (Two year Anniversery of fatcat politics coming in a few weeks) I started a list of people who were saying NO-TO-BUSH.   If I had stayed on top of it and kept it updated it would be enough for a wiki by now.


This latest ruling agaist Bush and the Unitary President Theory is just a harbinger of things still to come for the little cowboy when he starts paying for his arrogant and illegal War OF Terror...   You aint heard nothin yet Mr. Bush...


George W. Bush, you may be the only president to have a Presidential Library/Presidential Incarceration Facility in the history of these United States...   I think it would be highly appropriate.


Thru one door you could present all the evidence of your corruption and traitorous acts of hubris agaisnt the American People.   Thru another door we could view you while you wile away the rest of your days while on public display so as to present a tangible credible deterrent for future Presidents with ambitions of being a king...

Judge strikes down Bush on terror groups


LOS ANGELES - A federal judge struck down
President Bush's authority to designate groups as terrorists, saying his post-Sept. 11 executive order was unconstitutionally vague, according to a ruling released Tuesday.



"This law gave the president unfettered authority to create blacklists," said David Cole, a lawyer for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Constitutional Rights that represented the group. "It was reminiscent of the McCarthy era."



U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins enjoined the government from blocking the assets of the two groups. The same judge two years ago invalidated portions of the Patriot Act.



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Dennis Prager & Muslims

Andrew Sullivan pointed to an amazing article by Dennis Prager on how dangerous to America it will be if Keith Ellison (newly elected Democratic Congressman from Minnesota, who is the first Muslim elected to Congress). Apparently Ellison has said that he will take his oath of office on the Qur'an, not on the Bible, which seems reasonable, since he is not a Christian or a Jew. Prager says: "Insofar as a member of Congress taking an oath to serve America and uphold its values is concerned, America is interested in only one book, the Bible. If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don't serve in Congress." Prager then says, "When all elected officials take their oaths of office with their hands on the very same book, they all affirm that some unifying value system underlies American civilization. If Keith Ellison is allowed to change that, he will be doing more damage to the unity of America and to the value system that has formed this country than the terrorists of 9-11." Amazing! A man swearing the oath of office on a Qur'an is worse than the Al-Qaida terrorists who killed 3,000 people on September 11!

I had been under the impression that the Constitution forbids religious tests for office, which is what Prager is suggesting. Article VI of the Constitution reads: "The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." Notice that it says nothing about whether the person has to take the oath of office while holding or resting his hand on a book.

UPDATE: The Anti-Defamation League has issued a forthright denunciation of Prager - good for them.

Middle East On The Brink

What hath Bush Wraught...?

The events unfolding in the Middle East are beginning to take on the aspects of anarchy enmass.   Bush's endless wars have taken a toll more dire than any of us have expected.   Those of us who spoke out against the War In Iraq beforehand could only see nothing good coming from it.   What we are seeing now is diametrically opposed to the proposed incompetent ideological reasons for it's waging.


Little attention has been paided to the immensely important fact that Iraq's western Anbar Province has been ceded to the Insurgency / Al-Queda.   Baghdad has been turned into a picture perfect haven of urban-guerilla warfare, jihad heaven.   From daily reports of death and destruction scattered from one end to the other, Iraq is out of control.   "The White House conceded that Iraq has moved into a dangerous new phase of warfare requiring changes in strategy".   - Yeah... Right...


With a government that is paper thin as the constitutional documents that created it, principle factions of it's democratically elected representatives are directly implicated in ethnic cleansing and death squads.   It's leadership have overtly saught relations with key players in the region that the initial objectives of Bush's Wars of Aggression were meant to destroy.

Sadr is so powerful that if provincial elections were held now, he would sweep most of the south and also take Baghdad :: WaPo link

The Islamic Republic of Iraq has turned to it's creator with defiance and bitterness as is reflected in the polls which show the Iraqi want us out of their country.   The American Public has cast it's vote of no-confidence in the inept and corrupt handling of the war.   The reality that Iraq is a lose / lose proposition has finally overcome the propoganda spewing forth from the spinmeisters of Washington D.C.


Bush has finally and reluctantly accepted the facts that he must let his father's team take control.   They and the new leadership and oversight of the new Democratic Majority in Congress are now burdened with salvaging the ruined folly of his mistakes.   Drastic measures are called for where none look promising.

Addressing the sectarian problem by engaging Iraq's neighbors, notably Iran and Syria, is an idea gaining favor within the 10-member, bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which is in the final phase of its eight-month search for a new policy. But the panel was still deeply divided over recommendations going into its meeting yesterday. :: WaPo link

There is nothing positive to be gained by our continued presence there.   It is time to get our people out of the crossfire.   That may be the best we can do within the reality of Bush's Nightmare...

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Harry Reid

I guess this is a fact that more politically-minded people probably know - but Harry Reid, new Senate Majority Leader in January, is also a Mormon. It's interesting that his religion is not nearly the issue that Mitt Romney's is.

Heavenly Mother

I clicked on one of the links that Andrew Sullivan provided in his discussion of Mormon undergarments, and came across a fascinating website on Mormonism. One Mormon doctrine that I did not expect to find at all is that Mormons believe there is a Heavenly Mother alongside a Heavenly Father, and that together they produce the spirits of human beings.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints rejects the idea found in some religions that the spirits or souls of individual human beings are created ex nihilo. Rather it accepts literally the vital scriptural teaching as worded by Paul: "The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God." This and other scriptures underscore not only spiritual sibling relationships but heirship with God, and a destiny of joint heirship with Christ (Rom. 8:16-18; cf. Mal. 2:10).

Latter-day Saints believe that all the people of earth who lived or will live are actual spiritual offspring of God the Eternal Father (Num. 16:22; Heb. 12:9). In this perspective, parenthood requires both father and mother, whether for the creation of spirits in the premortal life or of physical tabernacles on earth. A Heavenly Mother shares parenthood with the Heavenly Father. This concept leads Latter-day Saints to believe that she is like him in glory, perfection, compassion, wisdom, and holiness.

Elohim, the name-title for God, suggests the plural of the Caananite El or the Hebrew Eloah. It is used in various Hebrew combinations to describe the highest God. It is the majestic title of the ultimate deity. Genesis 1:27 reads, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them" (emphasis added), which may be read to mean that "God" is plural.

Mormons believe that God the Father has a body like human beings, as does God the Son, while the Holy Spirit is a spirit.

Latter-day Saints perceive the Father as an exalted Man in the most literal, anthropomorphic terms. They do not view the language of Genesis as allegorical; human beings are created in the form and image of a God who has a physical form and image (Gen. 1:26). The Prophet Joseph Smith explained, "The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man's; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit" (D&C 130:22). Thus, "God is a Spirit" (John 4:24) in the sense that the Holy Ghost, the member of the Godhead who deals most often and most directly with humans, is a God and a spirit, but God the Father and God the Son are spirits with physical, resurrected bodies. Latter-day Saints deny the abstract nature of God the Father and affirm that he is a concrete being, that he possesses a physical body, and that he is in space and time.

On the idea that God the Father and Mother produce human spirits:

The Father, Elohim, is called the Father because he is the literal father of the spirits of mortals (Heb. 12:9). This paternity is not allegorical. All individual human spirits were begotten (not created from nothing or made) by the Father in a premortal state, where they lived and were nurtured by Heavenly Parents. These spirit children of the Father come to earth to receive mortal bodies; there is a literal family relationship among humankind. Joseph Smith taught, "If men do not comprehend the character of God, they do not comprehend themselves" (TPJS, p. 343). Gods and humans represent a single divine lineage, the same species of being, although they and he are at different stages of progress.

When I read this, I am reminded of the Shiur Qomah texts, which describe (the male) God in extremely anthropomorphic terms, as well as of the Enoch literature, in which Enoch ascends to heaven alive and is transformed into the highest angel (eventually gaining the name Metatron in the Hekhalot texts). It would be fascinating to learn what the intellectual/religious influences were upon Joseph Smith and other founders of the Mormon church, and whether they knew of the Enoch books or the other pseudepigrapha.

Andrew Sullivan and Mormonism

Andrew Sullivan has raised the question of whether Mormons are Christians, in connection with the probable Presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney (soon-to-be ex-Governor of Massachusetts), who is a Mormon. Among other things, he says in response to an e-mail: "And the inspiration for Mormonism's radically innovative understanding of the message and life of Jesus - Joseph Smith's "discovery" - is so alien to mainstream Christianity (and so transparently loopy) that I don't consider Mormons Christians. This is not to say I don't support their religious freedom or their right to play a full part of American politics and society. But they're not Christians as I understand Christianity" (italics mine). He later says that, "they are Christians of a very different stripe than most others."

His main discussion then turns to the racial politics of the Mormon church, and the fact that until the late 1970s black men could not be part of the Mormon priesthood (which is open to all men - and no women, a fact not noted by Sullivan). He thinks that this fact will probably cause problems for Romney should he run for President (and he might be correct, considering how troublesome George Allen's racist past - and present - was for him in his recent failed run for re-election to the Senate in Virginia).

He then, in a couple of recent postings, turns to the vital issue of Mormon undergarments (which adult Mormons wear after having gone through a ceremony in a Mormon temple), and publishes a photo of what they look like. He defends himself against a Mormon critic who was offended by his publication of the photo with these words: "My policy on this site is to publish reality, within certain boundaries of religious respect. If I can publish a cartoon of Muhammad, I can sure publish tasteful pictures of Mormon underwear."

I'm disturbed by the way that he's bringing up Romney's Mormonism. The racial history of the church seems relevant to me, as does the stand of the Mormon church against gay marriage or abortion - or in fact its stance on any political issue. But why engage in polemics against the idea that Mormons are Christians, or call Mormonism "transparently loopy"? Those of us who are not Christians sometimes raise our eyebrows at various aspects of Christian doctrine as taught by the Roman Catholic Church or the various Protestant churches - but our making fun of Christianity is not a reasoned argument against it. It seems to me that Sullivan is trying to make a principled argument that questions Romney's fitness for the presidency based on some of the doctrines, or former doctrines, of the LDS church. Engaging in mockery or calling Mormonism "loopy" doesn't advance his argument, and makes him sound bigoted.

Heroism in Darfur

Nicholas Kristoff recounts several moving stories of heroism in Darfur:

When the janjaweed militia attacked Fareeda, a village here in southeastern Chad near Darfur, an elderly man named Simih Yahya didn’t run because that would have meant leaving his frail wife behind. So the janjaweed grabbed Mr. Simih and, shouting insults against blacks, threw him to the ground and piled grass on his back.

Then they started a bonfire on top of him.

But his wife, Halima, normally fragile and submissive, furiously tried to tug the laughing militia members from her husband. She pleaded with them to spare his life. Finally, she threw herself on top of the fire, burning herself but eventually extinguishing it with her own body.

The janjaweed may have been shamed by her courage, for Mr. Simih recalls them then walking away and saying, “Oh, he will die anyway.” He told me the story as he was treated at a hospital where doctors peeled burned flesh from his back.

Kristoff doesn't state whether Halima lived or not, although since he doesn't mention her survival, I imagine that she sacrificed her life for her husband's. He tells another story of self-sacrifice, this time a sister leaving herself as a decoy for Janjaweed rapists so that her younger sister can flee:

One of the most inspiring people here is Suad Ahmed, a 25-year-old mother of two from Darfur. She lives here in the Goz Amir refugee camp, and last month she was collecting firewood with her beloved little sister, Halima, when a band of janjaweed ambushed them.

The janjaweed regularly attack women and girls — part of a Sudanese policy of rape to terrorize and drive away black African tribes — and Ms. Suad knew how brutal the attacks are. A 12-year-old neighbor girl had been kidnapped by the janjaweed and gang-raped for a week; the girl’s legs were pulled so far apart that she is now crippled.

But Ms. Suad’s thoughts were only for her sister, who is just 10. “You are a virgin, and you must escape,” she told her. “Run! I’ll let myself be captured, but you must run and escape.”

The local culture is such that if the little girl were raped, she might never be able to marry. So Ms. Suad made herself a decoy and allowed herself to be caught, while her sister escaped back to the camp.

Ms. Suad plays down her heroism, saying that even if she had tried to escape, she might have been caught anyway, for she was five months pregnant. Or, she says, maybe she and her sister both would have been captured.

In any case, however, the janjaweed beat Ms. Suad, and seven of them gang-raped her despite her pregnancy. “You black people have no land,” she recalls them telling her. “This land is not for you.”

People from the camp found Ms. Suad in the hills that evening, too injured to walk, and carried her back. Ms. Suad said she didn’t seek medical treatment, because she wanted to keep the rape as much of a secret as possible and didn’t even tell her husband, although he eventually found out along with a few others. He accepted that it was not her fault....

The gang rape and beating were excruciating, she says, but her sacrifice was worth it. “When my sister saw me brought back and saw what had happened to me, she understood,” Ms. Suad says. “She is very grateful to me.”

As Kristoff says earlier in the column: "Side by side with the most nauseating evil, you stumble across the most exhilarating humanity."

Thankfulness For Bush

The Dark Wraith...

These powerful words describe my feelings exactly.   'nuff said...   Thanks go to the Dark Wraith...   - fc

The Dark Wraith ForumsThankfulness


To Mr. Bush:

You, sir, have given me such a renewed sense of life, even as your policies have taken the lives of almost three thousand of my fellow Americans who are soldiers and perhaps 650,000 of my brothers and sisters in a land of which I knew little and cared less only six short years ago. I should be dispirited by such appalling carnage, yet I am curiously—perhaps troublingly—enlivened by the scope of this engine of death that has become my country.

I want it not to be this way; but in the effects of what you have done, I now have returned to something I had forgotten: you were always there.

I don't mean you, personally, but you as an attitude, a posture, a way of Americanism that had been lurking in the shadows all the years I was becoming complacent, all the years I was imagining a world becoming better. It was not; and it was not because you as a face of America had always been there waiting to return from the receding memories of Vietnam, Central America, and other places most people don't even know about.

I almost forgot, as I drifted into this century in a sort of self-assured, half-slumber of comfort about America's future.

You reminded me that my America is not everybody's America; and if I should want my America, I must be forever diligent, eternally at the guard, and permanently ready to fight for it, perhaps even with my life, which you, I am most certain, would be willing to take if I were to become too much a vexation to you and your kind.

I am thankful for you, sir, because I now know that my kind probably outnumber yours: for you to stop us from stopping you, you will have to hurt a lot of people. Several hundred men being tortured in horrible isolation from the world? Three thousand or so American GIs dead? Twenty or thirty thousand more wounded? Six hundred fifty thousand Iraqis who have ceased to breathe?

You haven't even begun to see what you'll have to do to stop the world from stopping you.

Even from the tiny hill upon which I stand here in cyberspace, I can see thousands upon thousands who share my revulsion at you. Not merely at your policies, Mr. Bush, but at you: you as a coward, you as a liar, you as a manipulator, you as a torturer, you as a breeder of death, you as a destroyer of America's future, you as a taker from the poor, you as a giver to the rich, you as a phony from the day you set foot on this good earth.

You have bound millions and millions to a vision of America radically at odds with your own; and in so doing, you have made many of those people realize that they really do love that America, the one with broad and ever-expanding liberty, the one where laws compel the enforcers far more than they do the masses, the one ever striving to the promise of a living constitution that commences with a long bill of rights, not a summary manifesto of repression. I could not have hoped for a man whose America is so vile that he would make so many strive so hard for a nation so fundamentally different from that.

You have made patriots, Mr. Bush, the kind who will not yield their country to an outcast from a bleak, brutish land of cruel people. You have made patriots of tens of millions, not just here in the United States, but around the world. Have you any idea how grateful the world will be when you are finally removed from the stage and sent back to the shadows whence you came? Have you any idea, sir, how many people around the world will celebrate, certainly with great caution, the return of hope that this nation can lead by moral principle and not by incompetent violence? The world needs the United States, and the world will once again have it, staggered, poorer, a bit humbler, and all of that to the better if it is to pose as the wise and chastened leader.

I am thankful for you, Mr. Bush. You have made me once again the patriot I once was, and in this renewed vigor to a better world, I am willing to withstand you, and I can do so in no small part because you have made so many, many others utterly resolute in reclaiming this nation and, indeed, this world from your kind.

May you have a good and bountiful Thanksgiving, George W. Bush; and may you be secure in the thought that you are appreciated so much by me, as I contemplate the world and this republic in the hard and joyous task of rebuilding this nation from the shattered land you have made of it. I shall in that glad time, then, end my days pursuing the purpose that was reborn in the time of your tyranny; and every one of those days of that future, I shall rejoice in the certain knowledge that you and those like you can do no more harm, at least until a future generation falls into that slumber of complacency.

The Dark Wraith has spoken.

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Buy Nothing Day

Prticipate by NOT Participating...

This info is by the way of ProfMarcus.   And, yes, he does take it personally and is very good at expressing himself.   If you have not visited his page, it is in your best interest as progressive liberals to do so.   A ton of good info...   Highly recommended... He has stopped by a couple of times here so I just added a button for him and his friends to my Hall of Fame list of Friends Who Comment...   - fc

And, yes, I DO take it personally

THE ULTIMATE REFUND: On November 24th and 25th - the busiest days in the American retail calendar and the unofficial start of the international Christmas-shopping season - thousands of activists and concerned citizens in 65 countries will take a 24-hour consumer detox as part of the 14th annual Buy Nothing Day, a global phenomenon that originated in Vancouver, Canada.

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Democrats' Victory Is Felt

by K Street Lobbyists...

This is especially welcome news.   Also another footnote to the defeat of Santorum...   - fc

washingtonpost.com
Democrats' Victory Is Felt On K Street


By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, November 23, 2006; Page A01


Drug companies are particularly hungry for Democratic help, including the industry's trade association. "We woke up the day after the election to a new world," said Ken Johnson, spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. "We're going to have tough days ahead of us."



A post-election e-mail to executives at the drug company GlaxoSmithKline details just how tough. "We now have fewer allies in the Senate," says the internal memo, obtained by The Washington Post. "Thus, there is greater risk over the next two years that bad amendments will be offered to pending legislation." The company's primary concerns are bills that would allow more imported drugs and would force price competition for drugs bought under Medicare.



The defeat of Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) "creates a big hole we will need to fill," the e-mail says. Sen.-elect Jon Tester (D-Mont.) "is expected to be a problem," it says, and the elevation to the Senate of Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) "will strengthen his ability to challenge us."



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