The following letter has been faxed to the White House (202-456-2461). Please see below for a letter faxed to leaders in the House and Senate urging an override of the president’s veto. (The House has done it! 361 to 54—ninety votes more than needed to override.) Please see our ‘Political Action’ page for fax and phone numbers of the White House and Senate. Help us press for a Congressional override of the president’s veto—it would be a first. We’re halfway there. Thank you.
Congressional Budget Office figures released Wednesday, Oct. 24, estimate that total spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “and other activities related to the war on terrorism” may amount to between $1.2 trillion and $1.7 trillion through fiscal year 2017. Counting interest (we’re fighting on borrowed money), the costs over the next decade could reach $2.4 trillion. The costs may go higher. Iraq alone accounts for $1.9 trillion, including about $564 million in interest. This latest estimate is more than 40 times higher than the Bush administration’s initial (2003) estimates of about $50 billion. The CBO’s projection assumes that 75,000 troops will still be in Iraq ten years from now.
The Arctic ice cap normally melts to some extent every summer, but it’s been melting at alarming rates in recent years. The sea ice extends only about half as far as it did 50 years ago, and the Arctic has lost about one-third of its area since satellite measurements began about the mid-1970s.
Yes, we’re interested in that. The president held a press conference this morning, Oct. 17. He said this: . . . we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems...
Sullivan and Marty Lederman at Balkinization have fittingly harsh judgments on what today’s New York Times article “Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations” tells us about the Bush Justice Department’s blind eye toward torture. (“A place of inspiration” is how former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales described DOJ.) Lederman, who worked many years at Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, writes:
Here is heartening news: The first of the major Democratic presidential candidates tells the White House not to start a war against Iran. Now, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, what say you?
(Reid, Pelosi-care to add your voices? John Warner? Retired generals?)
The Huffington Post presents exclusive excerpts of a major policy speech to be delivered in Iowa today (9/12) by Senator Barack Obama in which the Illinois senator will declare: “George Bush and Dick Cheney must hear-loud and clear-from the American people and the Congress: you don’t have our support, and you don’t have our authorization for another war.”
We like this man, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois. In 2002 he voted Nay to authorizing military force against Iraq. On Friday, Sept. 7, Durbin put the White House on notice that he, the Assistant Majority Leader, will not vote for any more Iraq war funding that is not...
The Times of London reports that the Pentagon has drawn up plans for a massive three-day strike against 1,200 targets in Iran to “take out” its military capabilities.
Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.
Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus.”
We do not know quite how to express the quality of gratitude and belongingness we feel when we hear the President of the United States, once again, on his 16th? visit to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, refer to our stricken area as “this [or that] part of the world,” as he has done in post-Katrina visits going back at least to early 2006. It would be one thing if he were talking about the tsunami in Indonesia . . . Oyster at Your Right Hand Thief and David Kurtz at TPM Café have both noted this seemingly habitual phrasing, which can only be felt as off-putting. And it can only be interpreted as the speaker’s distancing of himself from responsibility for the area described. (In its patent intent to annoy, the locution is similar to Republicans’ machine-like repetition of “the Democrat party” instead of “the Democratic party.”) For a president who claims to be a Texan through and through, this construction of speech doesn’t sound very neighborly.
Excerpts from the Commander’s remarks to the American Legion in Reno, Nevada, Aug. 28. Hear any echoes of Dick Cheney’s speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2002 (almost five years ago to the day)?
“[W]e are advancing freedom and liberty as the alternative to the ideologies of hatred and repression. . . .
BBC reports that Vice President Dick Cheney-who predicted in March 2003 that “we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators” and claimed in May 2005 that the insurgency was in its “last throes”-is ready to declare the surge a success. Meanwhile, in the reality-based community, Juan Cole at Informed Comment counters that in July, normally a low-casualty month in Iraq because of the searing heat, U.S. military deaths were nearly double the casualty rate in July 2006.
The Washington Post reports that state and local officials are irked-and worried about future chaos and blame games-because the White House and DHS are ignoring their input in shaping the National Response Plan, a document intended to guide federal, state, and local emergency response. The plan was supposed to be ready by June 1, the official start of the hurricane season, but it is still being revised-behind closed doors.
Our friends at the American Society of Civil Engineers are concerned like everyone else about the catastrophic collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis. ASCE is calling attention to the degraded condition of America’s roads, bridges, and other infrastructure, and proposes an Action Plan for the 110th Congress, including the establishment of a National Infrastructure Commission.
The Associated Press and ABC News report that on the same day the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis collapsed (Aug. 2), Bush administration officials announced the White House would veto a $20 billion water-projects bill that the president claimed was “laden with pork-barrel programs.”
A report titled “The Best Laid Plans” was issued June 27 by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a legal watchdog group, concerning FEMA’s preparation for handling a hurricane of Katrina’s magnitude, and analyzing the agency’s failure to implement the plan-or even to communicate with itself. (See Raw Story’s article here.)
From 2001 to 2005, the Bush administration’s budget allocations for New Orleans area hurricane protection averaged one-fifth of the amount requested by Louisiana officials. In the 2005 budget, Louisiana requested about $26 million; even after the very active hurricane season of 2004, the Bush White House offered only about $4 million, an amount that the U.S. spends about every 20 minutes in Iraq. (Current U.S. expenditures in Iraq now run at approximately $10 million per hour, roughly $12 billion per month.)
Just supposing our national government were ever to be infiltrated, somehow occupied by invisible agents of a foreign power (without the public quite realizing it) – If this happened and then the public somehow became aware that the government had fallen into the hands of men loyal to an alien power, then would the people yank the usurpers out of office at once?