This blog will focus on political images I have found all around the Internet, though I will intersperse some commentary and quotes that I find interesting.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Friday, August 24, 2007
Did You Know - Mayor Kelty
This morning, the President of the Executive Committee of the Republican Party of Allen County, Kenneth Neumeister, turned in his resignation to Republican Party Chairman, Steve Shine, because of the campaign fiance scandal surrounding Republican Mayoral candidate Matt Kelty.
From WANE-TV
Did You Know - Bush Loves Him Some Profits!
If there is a compassionate God, and I don't believe there is, George Bush and his ilk would certainly be the folks burning in hell.
The Bush administration, continuing its fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for New York, California and others to extend coverage to children in middle-income families.
Administration officials outlined the new standards in a letter sent to state health officials on Friday evening, in the middle of a month-long Congressional recess. In interviews, they said the changes were aimed at returning the Children’s Health Insurance Program to its original focus on low-income children and to make sure the program did not become a substitute for private health coverage.
From the NY Times (free registration required)
Did You Know - The Surge Is Failing
A bipartisan majority of foreign policy experts surveyed say the U.S. troop surge in Iraq is failing, Foreign Policy magazine said Monday.
The magazine said two-thirds of the more than 100 foreign policy experts called for a troop withdrawal in 18 months. Twenty-five identified themselves as conservative, 39 as moderate and 44 as liberal. The surge was the additional deployment of about 20,000 U.S. soldiers, mainly concentrated in the Baghdad area, to launch offensives against insurgents.Of the experts surveyed, 53 percent said the surge is having a negative impact, up 22 percentage points in the past six months. Ninety-two percent believe the war is having “a negative impact on U.S. national security."
From UPI
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Did You Know - Soldiers Tell It Like They See It
As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)...
In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a "time-sensitive target acquisition mission" on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.)
While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse — namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force....
From Daily Kos reporting on Joe Klein reporting on an op-ed by some American troops.
Did You Know - ACLU Still Pressing on Bush Spying.
The government must answer a watchdog group's demands to release records about the nation's classified terrorist spying program, the chief judge of a secretive national security court has ruled.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which announced the order Friday, said it was the first time the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had responded to a request filed by the public.
In her 2-page order, dated Aug. 16, Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly called the ACLU's demand "an unprecedented request that warrants further briefing."
From MSNBC.
Did You Know - Impressionable Press
Martin Kaplan, Associate Dean at the University of So. Cal. Annenberg School for Communications...
"Straight news is not what it used to be. It has fallen into a bizarre notion that substitutes something called 'balance' for what used to be called 'accuracy,' or 'truth,' or 'objectivity.' That may be because of a postmodern malaise in society, in which the notion of a truth doesn't have the same reputation it used to, but, as a consequence, straight journalists both in print and in broadcast media can be played like a piccolo by people who know how to exploit that weakness."
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Monday, August 20, 2007
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Did You Know - Karl Rove
Rove's oft-touted "genius" is nothing more than single-minded amorality. In campaigns and in the administration, he was and is unapologetically amoral in service to his own cause or that of his client: his "genius" is that he has consistently been willing to go farther, be meaner, and invent more astonishing lies than would be done by anyone in politics with a thin remaining threads of a conscience. From smearing John McCain's children with race-baiting taunts to attacking the careers and wives of critics to helping corrupt the most basic and foundational premises of the the United States Department of Justice, nothing has ever been considered "out of bounds". If a malevolent action is not taken -- such as ratcheting up the already venomous Republican rhetoric against immigrants -- it is done only in service to calculated poll numbers, never as a nod to basic morality or patriotism or human decency.
I Wish I'd Said It
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
--John Kenneth Galbraith
