Tag Archives: George W Bush

Ten years into the Bush-Cheney Clusterfuck

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Year: 2003
Photographer: Jean-Marc Bouju
Nationality: France
Organization / Publication: The Associated Press
Date: 31-03-2003
Country: Iraq

Caption: An Iraqi man comforts his four-year-old son at a holding center for prisoners of war, in the base camp of the US Army 101st Airborne Division near An Najaf. The boy had become terrified when, according to orders, his father was hooded and handcuffed. A soldier later severed the plastic handcuffs so that the man could comfort his child. Hoods were placed over detainees’ heads because they were quicker to apply than blindfolds. The military said the bags were used to disorient prisoners and protect their identities. It is not known what happened to the man or the boy.

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socialismartnature: To this day, not a single soul among the US political elite has been brought to justice for the crime against humanity that was the invasion, war, and occupation of Iraq. (via: ihatepeacocks)

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Dying vet’s ‘fuck you’ letter to George Bush & Dick Cheney needs to be read by every American

“…I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences…”

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The war lasted years longer and cost 100 times as much as the Bush administration’s estimates.

JM Ashby: It should be reiterated that President Bush kept the cost of the Iraq war off the books while he was in office, and when Republicans make the claim that President Obama dramatically increased the national debt upon taking office, the only reason they are able to make that claim is because the president decided we should begin taking responsibly for the cost of the war by adding it to routine budgets rather than paying for it with emergency authorization bills.

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A Decade Of Mistakes: Timeline Of The Iraq War (3 selections):

MAY 1, 2003: Mission Accomplished. [M]y fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. [Bush, 5/1/03]

MAY 12, 2007: Billions in oil missing in Iraq. “Between 100,000 and 300,000 barrels a day of Iraq’s declared oil production over the past four years is unaccounted for and could have been siphoned off through corruption or smuggling, according to a draft American government report. Using an average of $50 a barrel, the report said the discrepancy was valued at $5 million to $15 million daily.” [New York Times, 5/12/2007]

JUNE 13, 2011: Department of Defense announces that $6.6 billion dollars earmarked for Iraq has been lost with no explanation. [It was] enough to run the Los Angeles Unified School District or the Chicago Public Schools for a year, among many other things. For the first time, federal auditors are suggesting that some or all of the cash may have been stolen, not just mislaid in an accounting error. [LA Times, 6/13/11]

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10 years later: documenting the true history of the Bush Administration

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“The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.” — George W. Bush

On this day in 2003, a U.S. led coalition invaded Iraq. President Bush said the goal of Operation Iraqi Freedom was to “disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” The Iraqi invasion was strongly supported by Vice President Cheney. As Defense Secretary during the 1991 Gulf War, he opposed an invasion of Iraq, saying it wasn’t worth the casualties or “getting bogged down.” The U.S. combat role in Iraq ended last year after 4,486 Americans were killed, another 32,223 wounded. Direct spending on the Iraq war is estimated at $757 billion, a figure that does not include interest on money borrowed to finance the war — or taking care of veterans. A Brown University study in 2011 said it may also cost $1 trillion more (through 2050) to care for veterans of the 105-month war. On this day in 2011,  President Obama ordered air strikes on Libya.

MARCH 19: On this day in 2003, a U.S. led coalition invaded Iraq. President Bush said the goal of Operation Iraqi Freedom was to “disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” The Iraqi invasion was strongly supported by Vice President Cheney. As Defense Secretary during the 1991 Gulf War, he opposed an invasion of Iraq, saying it wasn’t worth the casualties or “getting bogged down.” …A Brown University study in 2011 said it may also cost $1 trillion more (through 2050) to care for veterans of the 105-month war.

OFFICIALS KNEW Iraq Had No Weapons of Mass Destruction

British and U.S. intelligence agencies “were informed by top sources months before the invasion that Iraq had no active WMD programme, and that the information was not passed to subsequent inquiries,” according to the Guardian.

MOTHER JONES: According to the first-ever comprehensive count of the true toll of the combined wars, the estimate the [Bush Administration] used to sell the invasion in 2003 was about 100 times too low. (i.e. $50-60 billion):

So what did that $6 trillion get us, exactly? Since we borrowed to pay for much of the war, we’re facing nearing $4 trillion in cumulative interest between now and 2053, according to the 30 researchers who worked on the Costs of War report for Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.

To date, according to the report, medical and disability claims of U.S. war veterans of Iraq have reached $84 billion; ongoing care for wounded Iraq war vets and their families is expected to require nearly $500 billion more over the next several decades. Homeland Security got $245 billion in additional funding thanks to increased threats of terror—real, imagined, and staged—over the last ten years. On-the-ground operations alone ended up being 16 times more expensive than the Bush cabinet’s original estimate for the entire enterprise.

Apparently the Office of Management and Budget was really, really bad at math for a while there in 2003.


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PAUL KRUGMAN wonders why there seems to be so little coverage of the 10-year anniversary:

Well, it’s not hard to think of a reason: a lot of people behaved badly in the runup to that war, and many though not all people in the news media behaved especially badly.

It’s hard now to recall the atmosphere of the time, but there was both an overpowering force of conventional wisdom — all the Very Serious People were for war, don’t you know, and if you were against you were by definition flaky — and a strong current of fear. To come out against the war, let alone to suggest that the Bush administration was deliberately misleading the nation into war, looked all too likely to be a career-ending stance. And there were all too few profiles in courage.

The war, then, was a big test — a test of your ability to cut through a fog of propaganda, but also a test of your moral and to some extent personal courage. And a lot of people in the media failed.

42% OF AMERICANS REMAIN COMFORTABLY DELUSIONAL, IGNORANT

53% of Americans believe the United States “made a mistake sending troops to fight in Iraq” while 42% say it was not a mistake. — a new Gallup poll

FACT: 100% of that 42% also believe this woman should lead the country

FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY:

Cheney: On the security front, I think there’s a general consensus that we’ve made major progress, that the surge has worked.  That’s been a major success.
Martha Raddatz: Two-third of Americans say it’s not worth fighting.
Cheney: So?
Martha Raddatz: So?  You don’t care what the American people think?
Cheney: No.

TEN YEARS LATER: “I did what I did. It’s all on the public record, and I feel very good about it. If I had to do it over again, I’d do it in a minute.” — Cheney in a new  documentary which aired last Friday.

10 COMPANIES PROFITING THE MOST FROM WAR: The 10 biggest arms producers accounted for more than half of the 2010 sales. The composition of those sales reflects the state of modern warfare, as battles are now often fought with remote surveillance and air strikes instead of ground combat.

Click here for a closer look at each company.

“In this charmed circle of American capitalism, Lockheed Martin-, Boeing-, and Raytheon-manufactured munitions destroy Iraq; George Schultz’s Bechtel Corporation and Dick Cheney’s Halliburton rebuild Iraq; and Iraq oil pays for it all.” — Who Benefits from Global Violence and War: Uncovering a Destructive System

Unfortunately military contractors and the politicians they handle walked away from the Iraq-Oil Party with greatly increased wealth and power, and left generations of American taxpayers to foot the bill.

…

NEVER FORGET:

“Maybe the American people can be brainwashed into forgetting why we supposedly went to war. Near as I can tell, our national memory span is down to about two weeks, and the media have been spectacularly unskeptical on this issue. But the rest of the world is not going to forget that WMDs were our primary reason for an unprovoked, pre-emptive war.” — the late Molly Ivins’ from April 29, 2003, barely a month after Shock ‘n Awe

Bush’s tax cuts on capital gains are the biggest contributor to rising income inequality

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While we consider how we are just days away from devastating sequestration cuts (which the Republican Party has decided is superior to closing tax loopholes for the super rich), take a look at why there’s such a huge gap in income inequality in America today:

Changes in tax law that reduced the federal tax rate on capital gains income is “by far the largest contributor” to rising income inequality in the United States, according to a new paper from Thomas Hungerford, an economist at the Congressional Research Service: By far, the largest contributor to this increase was changes in income from capital gains and dividends. Changes in wages had an equalizing effect over this period as did changes in taxes. Most of the equalizing effect of taxes took place after the 1993 tax hike; most of the equalizing effect, however, was reversed after the 2001 and 2003 Bush-era tax cuts. [...] The large increase in the contribution of capital gains and dividends to the Gini coefficient, however, is due to the large increase in the share of after-tax income from capital gains and dividends, and to the increase in the correlation of this income source with after-tax income. 

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We’ll stop talking about George W. Bush when the things he did while he was president for eight years stop affecting us today.

The immediate impacts of the Sequester: this should be GREAT for our economy!

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Remember 10 years ago, when George W. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security and moved many established bureaus and agencies to DHS (along with hiring many, many, many new federal employees)? The same political party who thought that was a great idea at the time now, 10 years later, wants to burn it all to the ground because a Democrat is in the White House — and because they refuse to even consider closing tax loopholes for the wealthy.

Here’s how the GOP’s fickle political ideologies will affect us all in just two short weeks:

Federal Times reports that DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano outlined how the Sequester will affect her department on March 1: “Sequestration would roll back border security, increase wait times at our nation’s land ports of entry and airports, affect aviation and maritime safety and security, leave critical infrastructure vulnerable to attacks, hamper disaster response time and our surge force capabilities, and significantly scale back cybersecurity infrastructure protections that have been developed in recent years.”

Here’s a list of where the immediate impacts will hit first:

  • Frontline DHS law enforcement officers would be furloughed for up to 14 days
  • Layoffs at DHS
  • FEMA’s disaster relief fund would be cut by more than $1 billion (that fund had $7 billion in 2012)
  • The Secret Service would have to undergo furloughs and cut down on overtime, which would reduce agents’ availability and hinder ongoing criminal investigations.
  • Congressionally mandated levels of Customs and Border Protection officers and Border Patrol agents could not be maintained.
  • The Transportation Security Administration would have to cut its frontline workforce, which would “substantially increase passenger wait times at airport security checkpoints.”
  • Immigration and Customs Enforcement would not be able to sustain its current operations to detain and remove illegal immigrants, and could not maintain the 34,000 beds for detained immigrants that Congress now requires.
  • The Coast Guard would have to cut back its air and surface operations by almost 25 percent. This would hurt its maritime safety and security efforts, drug and migrant interdiction, fishing law enforcement, navigational aid efforts, and other law enforcement operations.
  • Homeland Security would not be able to move forward on critical management programs such as modernizing its financial systems.

And it’s going to cost us a lot of lost revenue:

Washington Post: National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen M. Kelley said in the statement that the cuts for Homeland Security would “have a ripple effect throughout the government, since Customs and Border Protection is the second-largest generator of federal revenue, behind only the Internal Revenue Service.” The NTEU president said furloughs for Department of Homeland Security personnel would increase wait times at ports of entry by nearly two hours, ultimately affecting the national economy. She pointed to a 2008 Commerce Department report that said border delays at that point were expected to cost the economy $86 billion by 2017 in the form of lost jobs, wages, economic output and tax revenue.

GovExec: The White House outlined some of the government-wide “severe impacts” in a fact sheet:

  • Loss of more than 1,000 FBI and other law enforcement agents
  • Justice Department furloughs of hundreds of federal prosecutors
  • Furloughs of all Agriculture Department Food Safety and Inspection Service employees for approximately two weeks
  • An unspecified number of furloughs at the Internal Revenue Service that would lead to more fraud slipping through
  • Reduced hours at Social Security Administration offices
  • Taking Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors “off the job for some period of time”

See also:

  • JANET NAPOLITANO’S Feb. 13 letter to Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss.
  • WHITE HOUSE FACT SHEET: Examples of How the Sequester Would Impact Middle Class Families, Jobs and Economic Security, 2/8/2013

How will the Republican Party punish the federal workforce today?

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The GOP doesn’t see federal workers as people – they’re pawns in a political game that’s played with two sets of rules, depending on the president’s political party.

Since President Obama took office, what’s one of the GOP’s favorite fallbacks to obstruct economic recovery while sticking it to the group they hate the most? Target federal workers! This week they want to cut the federal workforce (again):

Republican lawmakers in both chambers on Wednesday proposed reducing the federal workforce through attrition to avoid sequestration this year. The 2013 Down Payment to Protect National Security Act would cut the entire government workforce by 10 percent through attrition at an estimated savings of $85 billion over the next decade. It would replace the sequester for one year: The government will need to trim $85 billion in Defense and non-defense spending in fiscal 2013 if sequestration takes effect on March 1. The bill would allow federal agencies to hire one person for every three employees who retire or leave their job.

As Greg Sargent said, “That would do wonders for the recovery.” If the Republican Party didn’t have federal employees to kick around, they’d have no “ideas” or new bills ever. As Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va says,

“…government employees should not be asked to sacrifice more in the name of deficit reduction. Since 2011, federal employees have sacrificed $103 billion in the name of deficit reduction, more than $50,000 per employee,” Moran said, referring to the extended federal pay freeze and other measures. “It is time for Congress to find a comprehensive deficit plan that asks others to pay their fair share.”

Essentially, the GOP wants to reduce the workforce so we can all spare the wealthy and corporations from losing their very profitable tax loopholes and deductions? They want to reduce the federal workforce so more of their buddies, the private contractors, can be hired to do the work at much higher prices to the taxpayer? Sounds like the same song and dance we’ve been getting from the Republican Party for decades: take from the working and middle class to further enrich their benefactors.

Of course, it’s a much different story when a Republican is in the White House.  In June of 2012, Think Progress reported: “Public sector employment is now down 608,000 workers since January 2009, a 2.7 percent decline. At the same point in President Bush’s term, public sector employment was up 3.7 percent. If, over the past 40 months, public sector employment had grown at the same pace as it did in President Bush’s first term, there would be 1.4 million additional people at work right now. That’d be enough to bring the unemployment rate down by nearly a full percentage point.” See graph below:

Ultimately, Republicans would like to see us all working 16-hour shifts in corporate-sponsored mancamps (CorpCamps), living in CorpDorms, getting paid with vouchers which would be good for things like CorpFood or CorpMed. But asking the CEOs of obscenely profitable corporations to pay a living wage to their workers, or wanting a tax system that doesn’t reward wealth and punish everyone else? That’s socialism.

The good news: each corporate mancamp will sponsor its own Thunderdome. 

image: disassociatedramblings

Related: 

Attention federal workers: the Republican Party STILL hates you

HAPPENING NOW: George W. Bush at the Cayman Alternative Investment Summit

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Bush and Romney (and the richest Americans) built that! Romney plans to give even more tax cuts to the super rich — maybe he’ll keynote the Summit one day.

Buzzfeed: Former President George W. Bush is set to deliver the keynote address at the Cayman Alternative Investment Summit on Grand Cayman just a few days before the election. The conference will feature Bush as the keynote speaker on the first night, and British billionaire Sir Richard Branson on the second night. ”Institutional investors, private investors, asset allocators, fund managers, service providers, academics and regulators will benefit from this discussion on the future of the industry,” reads to the FAQ section of the website.

http://www.caymanai.com

President Obama’s FEMA

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The Washington Post reports on the President’s restoration of and improvements to FEMA since the dark days of “Heckuvajob Brownie” and George W. Bush, and provides some details on different visions held by Obama and Romney regarding the role of federal disaster response:

[FEMA Administrator W. Craig] Fugate and Obama have earned praise for restoring the agency’s reputation in the years since Katrina. Despite working for then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as head of the state’s emergency agency, Fugate said he rebuffed overtures from George W. Bush to lead FEMA after Katrina, saying that the GOP administration did not want to rebuild the agency in the fashion since embraced by Obama.

Although President Bill Clinton revamped FEMA after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, observers say the agency suffered from budget cuts and a lack of professional emergency managers during the George W. Bush administration, including the appointment of then-Administrator Michael D. Brown, who had no professional experience in disaster response.

Congress has broadened FEMA’s authority so that the agency can respond in advance of major storms, instead of waiting for governors to request federal aid after a disaster strikes. The measures earned plaudits from then-Gov. Haley Barbour (R) of Mississippi and Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) of Louisiana — usually tough Obama critics — and professional emergency managers who had sought the changes for years.

“We have a much better and more capable FEMA than we’ve had at various times in the past,” said Randy Duncan, director of the emergency management agency in Sedgwick County, Kan., and a leader of the International Association of Emergency Managers. “We very much like seeing people with a professional background in emergency management occupy that federal post. We think that it is inappropriate to put someone in that position based solely on political merit. We need a professional emergency manager in there.”

Jim Mullen, director of the Washington State Emergency Management Division and president of the National Emergency Management Association, said Obama’s legacy at FEMA has been restoring “strong professional emergency managers who can attract other emergency management professionals and support the ones already there and make certain that on this, at least, we should all be willing to put everything else aside and do what’s necessary for our country.”

[...] Obama’s changes at FEMA “have been night and day” compared with those under previous administrations, according to one veteran emergency manager who was not authorized to speak publicly for fear of jeopardizing federal disaster grant requests. “I don’t know who will be the next president, but they can’t put a political hack in the job of leading FEMA ever again.”

“Anti-business” Obama: the best president for corporate profits since 1900

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Think Progress: as the financial website Motley Fool noted today, President Obama is far and away the best president for corporate profits since 1900:

Even if corporate profits under Obama are compared to the 2008 peak — in order to erase the effect of the financial crisis — “average annual corporate profit growth under President Obama is 6.8%,” or nearly three times as large as it was under President Reagan. Both Presidents Bush actually oversaw corporate profit declines during their terms. Meanwhile, real GDP growth per capita is far higher under Obama than it was under either Bush administration.

Kind of throws a huge wrench into the GOP’s “Obama is anti-business” argument, doesn’t it? We’re recovering — let’s not screw this up.


via: current

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Paul Krugman: a Romney victory could mean a double-dip recession

Just 537 votes changed the course of American history

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…

Voiceover: ”Five hundred and thirty seven. The number of votes that changed the course of American history.”

Newscast: ”Florida is too close to call”

Voiceover: ”The difference between what was… and what could have been…”

“So this year, if you’re thinking that your vote doesn’t count.That it won’t matter. Well, back then, there were probably at least 537 people, who felt the same way.”

Announcer: ”Make your voice heard. Vote.”

How much do you want to bet that almost every one of those 537 people thought their vote wouldn’t count, that it didn’t matter?

Even if you’re a red state with dedicated electoral votes for president, your vote matters overall (popular vote) but especially down ballot — local, state, and the House and Senate. Throw out the members of Congress who have happily done nothing for the past 2-4 years — all for politics – intentionally harming the country to try and make President Obama a one-term president. 

If you’re able, vote for the other candidate. Clean house.

Ben Stein agrees with President Obama: raise taxes on the rich

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Raw Story: Conservative economist Ben Stein on Thursday seemed to know that he had wandered off message when he joked that the hosts of Fox & Friends might murder him for saying that it was not possible to balance the budget without raising taxes:

Ben Stein: “I hate to say this on Fox — and I hope I’ll be allowed to leave here alive — but I don’t think there is anyway we can cut spending enough to make a meaningful difference. We going to have to raise taxes on very rich people, people with incomes of like say, 2, 3 million a year and up, and then slowly move it down.”

Steve Doocy: “You do not think Washington just has a spending problem?

Stein: “I do not think they just have a spending problem. I think they also have a too-low taxes problem. And while all due respect to Fox, whom I love like brothers and sisters, the taxes are too low.”

The economist noted that even more revenue could have been brought in during President George W. Bush’s presidency if taxes had not been cut.

Stein: “The evidence is that there is no connection between the level of taxation and the level of economic activity. The biggest growth we’ve ever had in this country was roughly 1941 to roughly 1973, that was the best years we ever had and those were years of much, much higher taxes than we have now, during war time and during peace time. So, the economy can grow very fast, even with much higher taxes. And we’re going to have to do something.”

Doocy: “Taxes were like 70, 80 percent!”

Stein: “I know. And yet, we were very prosperous, we were extremely prosperous. I mean, the highest rate was in the 90s during parts of the 50s and, yet, we were very prosperous.”

When conservative jackwagons like Stein wander off-message and/or are uncharacteristically honest, it turns out that President Obama is correct and Mitt Romney is wrong.

But, ultimately, this will be Good News for Romney. Right, Gallup?

The popular vote vs. Diebold

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Anne Laurie: Getting too much sleep? Let Wonkette’s Rebecca Schoenkopf introduce us all to “our new Diebold“:

Hey, remember when they stole Ohio? Hahaha, yeah, good times. (Here is a quick story explainering the bizarre discrepancies between exit polls, which showed John Kerry winning handily, and the tabulated results, which flipped that. It has the special bonus of world’s greatest pollster Dick Morris musing that since exit polls are like never wrong, and are used in Third World countries to determine if an election’s been thieved, Occam’s Razor insists that the easiest answer is not that the machines were hacked, but that the liberal media fixed … the exit polls. To dissuade Bush voters from coming out. A man of fierce intellect, most certainly.) Right, so! It is time to meet your new Diebold machines, from H.I.G., a company of fine fellows who to the man have donated to Mitt Romney, and a full third of whose board of directors come from Bain? Oh yeah, them….

This is literally a bunch of stuff:

“The widespread use of electronic voting machines from ES&S, and of Diebold software maintained by Triad, allowed Blackwell to electronically flip a 4% Kerry lead to a 2% Bush victory in the dead of election night. ES&S, Diebold and Triad were all owned or operated by Republican partisans. The shift of more than 300,000 votes after 12:20 am election night was a virtual statistical impossibility. It was engineered by Michael Connell, an IT specialist long affiliated with the Bush Family. Blackwell gave Connell’s Ohio-based GovTech the contract to count Ohio’s votes, which was done on servers housed in the Old Pioneer Bank Building in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Thus the Ohio vote tally was done on servers that also carried the e-mail for Karl Rove and the national Republican Party. Connell died in a mysterious plane crash in December, 2008, after being subpoenaed in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit focused on how the 2004 election was decided (disclosure: we were attorney and plaintiff in that suit). Diebold’s founder, Walden O’Dell, had vowed to deliver Ohio’s electoral votes—and thus the presidency—to his friend George W. Bush. That it was done in part on electronic voting machines and software O’Dell happened to own (Diebold has since changed hands twice) remains a cautionary red flag for those who believe merely winning the popular vote will give Barack Obama a second term. This November, much of the Ohio electorate will cast its ballots on machines again owned by close cronies of the Republican presidential candidate…”

— Will E-Voting Machines Owned by His Buddies Give Mitt Romney the White House?

There has to be enough votes that can’t be easily flipped “in the dead of night.” Don’t let them cheat to win.

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“Romney’s likely to be in the mold of George W. Bush when it comes to foreign policy”

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“Romney is loath to mention Bush on the campaign trail, for obvious reasons, but today they sound like ideological soul mates on foreign policy. Listening to Romney, you’d never know that Bush left office bogged down by two unpopular wars that cost America dearly in blood and treasure. Of Romney’s forty identified foreign policy advisers, more than 70 percent worked for Bush. Many hail from the neoconservative wing of the party, were enthusiastic backers of the Iraq War and are proponents of a US or Israeli attack on Iran. Christopher Preble, a foreign policy expert at the Cato Institute, says, “Romney’s likely to be in the mold of George W. Bush when it comes to foreign policy if he were elected.”

— Mitt Romney’s Neocon War Cabinet (via wilwheaton)

Happy Birthday to America’s longest war

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thepoliticalnotebook:

A happy eleventh birthday to the war in Afghanistan, which it rather quietly celebrated on Sunday. (It’s almost a teenager, how time flies.)

Here are a selection of photos from the past month in Afghanistan, from The Atlantic’s In Focusblog.

Photos: French soldiers in their vehicle on their way to an operation in Kabul.  Jeff Pachoud/AFP/Getty. US Army soldiers based at Zangabad Forward Operating Base in Panjwal on an operation. Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty. A young Pashtun boy watches a joint Afghan-NATO patrol. Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty.

theamericanbear: 11 years ago, Oct. 7th, 2001, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. Thus began the longest war in American history, going on for over 4000 days. This milestone rolled by almost without mention yesterday. Is it possible that we feel shame?*

comic source, david rees, get your war on, Oct. 9th, 2001.

*No.