Fox in the Henhouse

A little Republican thinking here: Hmm, let me think...we need to have someone chair a Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus...hmm, who should do this job...hmm...wait, I've got it, Mark Foley. How absurd is this? Unfortunately it's all too common. It's akin to the perv who becomes a boyscout master or little league coach. How perfectly fitting for Foley to be the founder and co-chair of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus when he is so fond of underage boys. Nice.

Duped By Dubai

Seems to me I remember quite the hullabaloo regarding the Dubai Ports deal and how it was "settled" with an agreement to transfer handling of the ports to a U.S. "entity." Well here we are over a half a year later and, SURPRISE!, DP still hasn't transferred ownership. Boy do I smell a rat. Let's recall how this all began:

The administration quietly approved the sale of British-owned P&O to DP
World on Jan. 17 after a review by its secretive Committee on Foreign
Investments in the United States. But stung by the public and political outcry
once the decision became widely known last month, the White House and the
company owned by the Dubai government tried to placate critics by agreeing to a
45-day review of the deal's national security implications.

So you see, another successful, secret, sell-out arranged by the Shrub administration. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that someone in the administration was set to make some serious denaro on that deal...or maybe I should say UAE Dirham!

One Helluva Estimate

The NIE report excerpts should be, as Sen. Kennedy noted, the final nail in the coffin of Bush's 'the Iraq war has made us safer' nonsense. My podcast on the NIE. Read the actual excerpts for yourself here.

April Showers...

...sure ain't bringing September flowers.
An interesting point is that this National Intelligence Estimate report--a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government--was compiled in April. So, my question to you is, have things gotten better or worse since then?! [broken link]

Bush's Kryptonite

You just gotta love Dennis Goldford's description of the National Intelligence Estimate--that it's kryptonite for Bush. His point about a sow's ear, namely about the Republicans being able to make a silk purse out of a pig's ear, is well taken. Clearly, the republicans are crafty enough and have an enormous political machine that grinds out sound-bite after sound-bite, and they are, generally, on the same page. But if I hear another, "we are taking the fight to them" or "stay the course" mantra I'm going to literally puke. I know they love their platitudes, but.... How many non-partisan reports, how many obvious events must occur, and how many lives must be sacrificed, before the majority of American voters will come to see that this administration is a sham that is defined by war?

Saddam & Osama Bin Laden: No Link!

Podcast: http://www.archive.org/download/DuaneConradOrdinaryNetizen_09-08-06/OrdinaryNetizen_09_08_06.mp3

Again with Afghanistan

I find it no surprise that the NATO commander is calling for reinforcements in Afghanistan. Does anyone else?

It's not that difficult

It's not that difficult to figure out the Republican agenda and create a strategy, based on a more productive political platform, to defeat them in the November mid-term and even the next presidential election.

*Pick a script and stay with it.
*Get the majority of Democrats saying the exactly the same thing.
*Utilize some of the Republic tactics against them.
*We need to speak the plain and simple truth--that which is obvious to most all Americans

Let me vent a little here and elaborate: We need to put them, the Repugnantcans, on the defense by characterizing them as weak on the war on terror. Sound strange? It isn't at all when you define the war on terror properly--the way that countless military and other experts have been doing for years now--that the war on terror is NOT about Iraq, but about al-Qaeda and other fundamental radicals (but mainly al-Qaeda--Hezbollah didn't bring down the twin towers did they? No, of course not. It was Saddam Hussan! Do you see how ridiculous that last statement sounds? Good, because part of the strategy is just this: to point out, over and over again, how ridiculous it is to spend over 300 BILLION dollars (and counting) on an Iraqi civil war when Iraq had nothing, I repeat, NOTHING to do with 9/11 or al-Qaeda. Yes, there's another factor that can be spelled out more--that all the Republican denial of this Shia-Sunni civil war (and let's not forget the Kurds) is crazy talk. Nearly every level-headed person who knows anything about the current and historical facts of that region knows full well what is going on is essentially a civil war. Doesn't the average American believe that 300 BILLION dollars can go a long in tracking down terrorists, INCLUDING Bin Laden and scores of al-Qaeda, which would make us and the world much safer (and almost assuredly cost less American lives) than the Bush-Iraq fiasco?!
I'll likely fill in these four basic strategems in a future post.
Some positive signs are coming in though--http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14618513/ Americans don't believe that the Iraq war has made them safer and they are dead-on correct. Now the task is to get even more into that camp of truth. Instead of the current 60% feeling that this blunder will lead to MORE not less terror attacks in this country (by the way, the exact opposite of Bush's assertion of 'we gotta fight them over there or they attack here' nonsense) I'd like to see this figure bump up to about 70%. Can't really hope for much more than 70-75% though; the way I see it, between the neocons and the knuckleheads (albiet often overlapping categories) that probably adds up to about 20-25%!).