FATS SCREWS UP AGAIN

Atrios catches Fats Limbaugh making another horrendous claim:

Look, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it.

What's nice this time is that at least one station decided that the gasbag is nearing the end of his reign:

The Rush is no longer going to be on the air on WJBC. Radio Bloomignton General Manager Red Pitcher announced this afternoon the syndicated Rush Limbaugh Show will air for the last time March 2, 2007. .... Pitcher believes Limbaugh's popularity is declining becuse of controversial remarks that are offending even his Republican fans.

Fat and Stupid also came out with this beuatiful example of wingnut logic:

"My question is, if there's nothing we can do to stop global warming, then how in the world could we be responsible for it? Simple common sense!"

GREAT IRAQ RESOURCE

Just in case the wingnuts try to make false claims about what the Bush regime said about Iraq, you can check this great collection of quotes called Iraq on the Record, prepared at the direction of Rep. Henry A. Waxman. I've included this site on my link list at the left.

THE REAL "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED"

September 2, 1945, USS Missouri

THE KURDS TO THE RESCUE???

Earlier this week, there was a report on NPR about the Kurdish soldiers who were being sent to Baghdad as part of Fredo's escalation and this could be a very bad move because there is long-standing enmity between the Arabs of Iraq and the Kurds.

From Lexis-Nexis:

Morning Edition
January 18, 2007 Thursday

(excerpts)

General ANWAR DOLANI (Iraqi National Army): (Through translator) Now there is a very bad massacre of the people of Baghdad there. Shia, Sunnis, anybody (unintelligible), we will go and defend, try to stop this kind of killings.

WATSON: Like many of soldiers here, the general is a former Pesh Merga. That's the name for Kurdish rebels who long fought against successive Arab dominated governments in Baghdad. Speaking in Kurdish, Golani says this job will not be easy.

General GOLANI: (Through translator) I think hardest challenge will be in the communication. And probably 90 percent of our soldiers do not speak Arabic.

WATSON: This deployment is extremely unpopular in Iraqi Kurdistan, where the presidents of the semi-autonomous region last year ordered all Iraqi flags to be removed and replaced by the flag of Kurdistan.

Lieutenant Colonel DENNIS CHAPMAN (U.S. Army National Guard): The public is adamantly against it up here.

WATSON: Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Chapman commands a small team of American military advisers attached to the Kurdish battalion.

Lt. Col. CHAPMAN: It's because there's a great fear of the ethnic strife down there in Baghdad, and somehow a fear of it making its way up here.

WATSON: Lt. Col. Chapman says there had been desertions, and he expects only several hundred soldiers to show up in Baghdad out of a battalion of some 1,600 troops.

WATSON: Asos Hardi, editor-in-chief of a Kurdish newspaper, fears that if the Kurds clash with Shiite Arab militias, it could spark a new conflict between Iraq's two main ethnic groups.

Mr. ASOS HARDI (Editor-in-Chief, Awene Newspaper): It could be the first ignition for the real conflict, real war between Kurds and Arabs in Iraq.

WATSON: Yesterday, at the army base, some Kurdish soldiers did not have nice things to say about their Arab countrymen.

WATSON: Why should we sacrifice ourselves for Arabs who are killing each other, said a Kurdish man here named Sadar Ahmed. The Arabs, he added, are our enemy.

SOME GOOD NEWS

Three seemingly unrelated groups (business, union and older persons) have recently decided to unite to promote a real discussion about health care and Social Security.

The effort by the Business Roundtable, SEIU and AARP is called "Divided We Fall" and has its own website.

On January 10, 2007, Larry Burton, the executive vice president of Business Roundtable, gave this testimony before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (from Lexis-Nexis):

Copyright 2007 Congressional Quarterly, Inc. All Rights Reserved. CQ Congressional Testimony
January 10, 2007 Wednesday
We have a very specific set of priorities on which we are urging action:

- First, Congress should act on continuing and expanding the State Child Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) that currently provides low-income children with access to health insurance coverage.

- Second, Congress and State leaders should act on legislation that removes statutory and regulatory barriers to increase health insurance options for Americans who do not have coverage.

- Third, wellness and prevention programs should be emphasized. Whether through incentives or public/private programs, every American should understand the importance of exercise, diet, immunization, and other disease prevention and health promotion programs.

- Fourth, consumer-centric health plans are an important option for health care coverage.

- Fifth, the government should release information on the comparative effectiveness of health care treatments. Consumers have a right to know what treatments and therapies work.

- Sixth, every individual in America should have access to information on the cost and quality of care provided in their communities.

- Seventh, Congress should permit reimbursement of providers by the federal government to be based on quality performance and the use of health information technology by those providers.

- Eighth, all Americans should have access to a uniform, secure, interoperable health care system that provides administrative and confidential medical information.

- And finally, Congress should reform the medical liability laws.


Notice that tort reform, the main health initiative by the Bush regime, is LAST on this list from serious people.

The president of the Business Roundtable appeared on Kudlow & Company, CNBC, on Tuesday January 16, 2007 and had this to say: (excerpted from Lexis-Nexis)

Mr. JOHN CASTELLANI (Business Roundtable President): Well, thanks, Bob. Delighted to be here. Today, Andy Stern, Bill Novelli and myself kicked off the "Divided We Fail" initiative, which really brings together our three very disparate organizations around an issue that quite frankly faces all of us in America. And that is our health and retirement security. You know, business roundtable companies provide health care for 34 million Americans but the system is broken. And what we are doing today is launching an initiative to create the political will for Congress, for governors, for state legislators to deal with these two very critical issues.

RADIO TIDBITS

War Whore presented a 2-for-one story this AM. She read from an article in Rev. Moon's INSIGHT magazine about Obama and Hilary. According to the article, Hilary has people doing opposition research on Obama and they have raised questions about his Muslim background. WW got to attack Hilary and Obama in the same story! [UPDATE: Atrios also mentions this fine example of wingnuttery]

WW later went on to tell a female Muslim caller that moderate Muslims need to drag Islam into (her word) "modernity." Perhaps she should tell her buddies Dobson, Falwell & Robertson to do the same with their version of Christianity.

Rusty Humphries had Dr. Lyle Rossiter on and although I did not hear the interview, I found an article by Rossiter on ClownHall. Rossiter merely repeats the tiresome argument that liberals are totalitarians. Humphries pushes Rossiter's view that liberals suffer from a psychopathology.

RADIO TIDBITS

Fredo's flip-flop on warrantless taps had Foamer really upset. He may have been this upset about Fredo's stand on immigration but this might be the last straw but I can't recall Foamer directly criticizing Fredo this harshly.

War Whore had Amir Taheri on and he said that Al-Qaeda wasn't in Iraq before the invasion. WW did NOT correct him. Taheri has sometimes been a bit too economical with the truth.

RADIO TIDBITS

War Whore¹ said today that the Republicans were hurt in the last election because they didn't oppose Congressional earmarks "strongly enough." As we can see from the graph and chart below from the WaPo, it doesn't look like they did ANY opposing.




Foamer² had two callers who STILL think the Iraq War is payback for 9-11. Naturally, Mark didn't correct them even though Darth Cheney and Pres. Fredo have both said otherwise.


¹ Laura Ingraham
² Mark Levin

THE TIMES & TAL AFAR

John Burns wrote an article about the troop escalation that had this curious line:

"The approach has been modeled on a successful American campaign effort 18 months ago in Tal Afar, a northern city that saw dramatic drops in violence and is now regarded as one of the few success stories of the American campaign."

As far I know, Tal Afar isn't a success.

THE FAIRNESS DOCTRINE

War Whore and Foamer are worried that the FCC may restore the Fairness Doctrine and with good reason. They and the other wingnut gasbags use the public airways to poison the political atmosphere with impunity. If we go back to the late 80s, we learn that many conservatives supported the Doctrine: "Conservative lawmakers who voted for the 1987 fairness doctrine legislation include Rep. Thomas Bliley of Virginia, Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia." This is prima facie evidence that the issue wasn't partisan. It has become so only because of the tremendous commercial success of Fats Limbuagh and those who followed him.

OF ALL THINGS TO MENTION

On MLK's birthday, the wingnuts could only blather about party affiliation.

War Whore Ingraham had a clown on from the Manhattan Institute who thought it was very important that we know MLK's father was a lifelong Republican.

PRES. FREDO IS KING!!!

From his interview on 60 Minutes:

PELLEY: Do you believe as commander-in-chief you have the authority to put the troops in there no matter what the Congress wants to do?

BUSH: In this situation, I do, yeah. Now, I fully understand they could try to stop me from doing it. But I made my decision, and we're going forward.

Ooooh! Here's a great quote for the psycho wingnuts who STILL insist we found WMD:

BUSH: The minute we found out they didn't have weapons of mass destruction, I was the first to say so.

PELLEY: When was it that you first found out or it dawned on you that, indeed, there were no weapons of mass destruction? And I wonder, did you think, "What have I done?"

BUSH: I wondered what went wrong, because you can't conduct this war on terror unless you've got good intelligence. And so the first thing I did was I put a commission together to take a good, hard look at what did go

MAHA MAKES A GOOD POINT

Why are there so many younger (less than 40 years old) wingnuts?

Because they’re too young to remember When Things Were Different, they don’t recognize that the way mass media has handled politics for the past thirty or so years is abnormal. What passes for our national political discourse — as presented on radio, television, and much print media — is scripted in right-wing think tanks and media paid for by the likes of Joseph Coors, Richard Mellon Scaife, and more recently by Sun Myung Moon. What looks like “debate” is just puppet theater, presented to manipulate public opinion in favor of the Right.

In this puppet theater “liberals” (booo! hisss!) are the craven, cowardly, and possibly demented villains, and “conservatives” are the noble heroes who come to the rescue of the virtuous maid America. Any American under the age of 40 has had this narrative pounded into his head his entire life. Rare is the individual born after the Baby Boom who has any clue what “liberalism” really is. Ask, and they’ll tell you that liberals are people who “believe in” raising taxes and spending money on big entitlement programs, which of course is bad.

Perhaps the good thing about Fredo's Fiasco is that the wingnut ideology will be discredited, at least for the relatively sane people.

GEN. PACE LIKES DEATH SQUADS

This is from the same Senate hearing I excerpted below.

SEN. JACK REED (D-RI): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you gentlemen, both, for your service. And, Secretary Gates, thank you particularly for signing up at a very difficult and challenging moment in our history. Thank you.

General Pace, General Petraeus labored many months to write a new counterinsurgency manual. And clearly within that manual it calls for a range of 20 to 25 counterinsurgents for every thousands of population, which in Baghdad translates to 120,000 troops. How many American forces will be there after we finish this build-up?

GEN. PACE: Thirty-one thousand, sir.

SEN. REED: And how many Iraqi forces will be there?

GEN. PACE: Fifty thousand, sir.

SEN. REED: So we're about 40,000 short of the doctrine.

GEN. PACE: Pure math, yes, sir. Not forgetting that places like El Salvador we helped with 55 soldiers total.

We only needed 55 because we supported the right-wing death squads:

On December 2, 1980, members of the National Guard of El Salvador intercepted the van carrying four American churchwomen as they were leaving the international airport in San Salvador. Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clark, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, and lay missioner Jean Donovan were taken to an isolated spot where they were shot dead at close range. (This is what it looked like)

The murder of the women, along with attempts by the Salvadoran military and some American officials to cover it up, generated a grass-roots opposition in the U.S., as well as ignited intense debate over the Administration’s policy in El Salvador.

PATRIOT MISSILES???

Pres. Fredo made a puzzling remark in his speech to the nation on 1/10/07:

We will expand intelligence-sharing and deploy Patriot air defense systems to reassure our friends and allies.

The only thing that makes sense is that our allies are worried that Iran might attack them if we take any military action against Iran:

One retired senior military officer looks at more forces going to the region, including Patriot missile batteries and equipment to counter antiship mines (neither of which would be useful against Sunni insurgents or Shiite militias in Iraq) and concludes that the Bush administration may have a broader agenda.

"The subtext of the speech tells me this is about Iran," says retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner. LINK

Maybe we're just "sending a message" to Iran. Maybe the neo-cons are desperate enough to broaden the war, much as Noxin did when he invaded Cambodia. Let's hope not.

SECDEF GATES GIVES US A TIMETABLE

SOURCE:
January 12, 2007 Friday
SECTION: CAPITOL HILL HEARING
LENGTH: 34692 words
HEADLINE: HEARING OF THE SENATE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE; SUBJECT: IRAQ; WITNESSES: ROBERT GATES, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE; PETER PACE, CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF;
CHAIRED BY: SENATOR CARL LEVIN (D-MI); LOCATION: 216 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Copyright 2007 Federal News Service, Inc.
(FROM LEXIS-NEXIS)

SEN. LEVIN: Now, the Iraqis have made both military and political commitments to us; is that correct?
SEC. GATES: Yes, sir.
SEN. LEVIN: And if those commitments are not kept, then what?
SEC. GATES: I would say two things. First, Mr. Chairman, as I indicated in my statement, I think we're going to know fairly early in this process whether the Iraqis are, in fact, prepared to fulfill the commitments that they've made to us in terms of being able to go into all neighborhoods, in terms of a lack of political interference in military operations, and things like that. So I think that we'll have a pretty good idea early on.
SEN. LEVIN: Like when?
SEC. GATES: Well, I would think within -- on the military side, probably within a couple of months.

Gen. Pace then confirms that the Iraqis have failed to live up to their previous commitments:

SEN. LEVIN: Ambassador Khalilzad said in August that Iraq faces an urgent crisis in securing Baghdad. That's August. He said that to combat this complex problem of Prime Minister Maliki's -- to combat this complex problem, Prime Minister Maliki's government has made securing Baghdad its top priority. The Iraqi government's Baghdad security plan has three principal components, Ambassador Khalilzad said. Three principal components. Those components are first, stabilize Baghdad zone by zone. Four Iraqi army battalions, two coalition brigades, and five military police companies will be redeployed to Baghdad, resulting in more than 12,000 additional forces on the city streets.

Did that happen?

GEN. PACE: No, sir.

SEN. LEVIN: Then the ambassador also said that after joint coalition and Iraqi military operations have secured a neighborhood or district, a structure of Iraqi security forces sufficient to maintain the peace is expected to be left in place.

Did that happen?

SEC. GATES: I'd better defer to General Pace, since I wasn't here then.

GEN. PACE: It did not, sir, no.

SEN. LEVIN: Did not happen.

In October, Prime Minister Maliki said the initial date that we've set for disbanding the militias is the end of this year or the beginning of next year.

Did that happen?

GEN. PACE: No, sir, it did not.

SEN. LEVIN: Maliki also said that a government committee was formed in October to give the militias a deadline to lay down their arms.

Did that happen?

GEN. PACE: To my knowledge, it did not, sir.

Uh oh, Gates is wrong about polls:

SEC. GATES:I remember that when President -- first President Bush made the decision to throw Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, the polls showed about 15 percent of the American people supported that action.

That's simply not true:

"Prior to the 1991 bombing of Baghdad, Americans were evenly divided as to whether to start action, or to give economic sanctions more time." LINK

Let's hope that Gates just made a simple mistake and did not deliberately try to mislead.

I didn't know this about the Shi'a:

SEC. GATES: Yes, sir. I think, in reality, there are four wars going on in Iraq right now simultaneously -- a Shi'a on Shi'a conflict in the South; sectarian violence, particularly in Baghdad, but also in Diyala and a couple of other provinces; an insurgency; and al Qaeda.

[snip]

Al Qaeda and the insurgents continue to inflict -- and the Shi'a extremists, the Jaish al-Mahdi, continue to inflict the vast preponderance of American casualties, not the sectarian -- not being caught in a cross-fire