Sooner Be Blue

Mostly politics, a few current events, a squirt of seltzer down yer pants .. a little blog for my rambles and rants.

2008/5/7

It's time to turn the house lights on...show's over.

@ 10:14 AM (5 days, 6 hours ago)

"Obama takes big step ahead in Democratic race"
 
Guess she was out to prove him electable, after all.
 
Look, I like both these candidates, they both have plus and minus qualities. I will vote for either one. But I have been so tired of this race...switching the news to cooking shows instead. I needed to refresh my mind.
 
But now it may be safe to start paying attention again.
 
"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Barack Obama took a big step toward the Democratic presidential nomination with an easy victory in North Carolina on Tuesday, and Hillary Clinton vowed to keep her struggling campaign alive after narrowly winning Indiana. [..]"
 
http://tinyurl.com/3kgzpu
 
Yep, after the worst couple of weeks of his campaign, Obama won North Carolina by 14 points and Hillary Clinton scraped by with only a 2-point win in Indiana. Looks like all that gas tax pandering didn't work, and now the arithmetic is even more stacked against her.
 
The TV talking heads are all but declaring her dead. Tim Russert said she canceled her morning TV appearances, and people are waiting for her to finally drop out. Maybe the game changed last night after all.
 
During the past month or so it's been pretty clear that Hillary's only chance to really win was to hope that Obama got hit by an asteroid or something. And he was hit by several asteroids...and still he stands. That he survived the Rev. Wright asteroid was heartening. He surely has the chops to take on McCain.
 
Hillary may not call it off yet, but the tolling bell of the inevitable is getting louder and louder. Even though Chelsea and Bill did all the proper fake smiles and head noddery as they stood behind her while she gave her Indiana “victory” speech, you could see sadness and defeat in their faces.
 
Even if you count Florida and Michigan, she would have to win KY and WV by thirty points. And then Oregon, etc. All she can hope for now is for Obama to have a bimbo eruption or an illegitimate child. You never can tell, so that may be why she's off to the next primary.
 
In the final analysis, I think it was all for the best that Clinton put up a good fight...her attacks surely have strengthened Obama, and in many ways immunized him for November.
 
Because, no matter her motivations, she did provide a valuable service and helped Obama learn how to persevere in the face of relentless attacks. The attack that got my goat was from that danged James Carville. Very few play the game of politics as dirty as James Carville (well, Karl Rove). Last week the ragin' Cajun was talking about Obama and told Newsweek, "If she gave him one of her cojones, they'd both have two." Classy, eh?
 
And still Obama stands.
 
I swear they looked rattled at Fox. I watched for a little while. Rove was trying to be negative about Obama and was insisting voters wouldn't see Bush when they saw McCain or vice versa, but they all looked sort of glum to me.
 
I enjoyed the hell out of it.
 

2008/5/5

And after all we've done to them!

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@ 07:28 AM (7 days, 9 hours ago)
 
"Iraq: U.S. has no claim to oil boom"
 
'America has hardly even begun to repay its debt to Iraq,' Baghdad official says.
 
From chicagotribune.com: BAGHDAD — As Congress gears up to debate the Bush administration's latest request for an additional $108 billion in war funding for Iraq and Afghanistan, Iraqis are fuming at suggestions being floated by lawmakers that Baghdad should start paying a share of the war's costs by providing cheap fuel to the U.S. military.
 
"America has hardly even begun to repay its debt to Iraq," said Abdul Basit, the head of Iraq's Supreme Board of Audit, an independent body that oversees Iraqi government spending. "This is an immoral request because we didn't ask them to come to Iraq, and before they came in 2003 we didn't have all these needs.
 
".... the soaring price of oil is likely to give Iraq a revenue bonanza this year of up to $70 billion, ....why Iraq isn't using its rising oil income to pay more of the costs of reconstruction."[..]
 
http://tinyurl.com/6cpmc3
 
How dare they! Everyone knows that 9/11 was an Iraqi plot, and that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the US. Everyone knows it certainly had nothing to do with oil, and everything to do with self-defense, or spreading freedom and democracy......<snort> NOT!
 
Yeah, I know...the US Congress is asking the people of a country which we have destroyed to pay for that destruction.
 
How much is the removal of Saddam worth?
 
But hey, 4,000 lives, $600 billion taxpayer dollars and counting. Just think what we could have done with that money to help our own people. We need to stop spending future money so we can help our war vets.
 
Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that Iraq has over $30 billion squirreled away in US banks, collecting interest, and it could reap an additional $100 billion in oil profits from 2007 and 2008.
 
So, they've got a surplus, while we're running a deficit. Why should we continue to pick up the tab for reconstruction?
 
Let the Iraqis squander and steal their own money for a change.
 
I heard on TV that our troops in Iraq have to buy gas on the open market, paying $3.23 a gallon that they've sacrificed their lives to help deliver. Which means the Pentagon's spending $153 million a month in Iraq on fuel alone.
 
Besides, there is no war in Iraq, there is only an occupation of Iraq by US troops. How do you win an occupation? We have to find a reason to declare ourselves unnecessary and leave.
 

2008/5/3

Most unpopular president EVER

@ 08:06 AM (9 days, 8 hours ago)
 
Ah, how sweet it is to be vindicated.
 
A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Thursday indicates that 71 percent of the American public disapprove of how Bush is handling his job as president -- setting a new record low. "The previous all-time record in CNN or Gallup polling was set by Truman, 67 percent disapproval in January 1952," said Keating Holland, CNN's polling director.
 
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/01/bush.poll/index.html
 
So what's with the other 29 percent? Are they living under a rock?
 
Ooh I see...the other 29 percent are Big Oil, Big Business, Big Pharm, Haliburton, Black Water...etc.
 
And if 71 percent of the American people don't think Bush is competently doing his job, many in that 71 percent have to be Republicans...hell, we don't have that many Democrats.
 
The irony is--we Democrats are screwing up our nominees so badly that if Bush COULD run again he would probably beat either of them.
 

2008/5/1

George Bush is John McCain's Rev. Wright

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@ 08:07 AM (11 days, 8 hours ago)

After a week of the media flogging the Wright story as hard as they possibly could, you'd think that the number one worry that concerned voters was Obama’s relationship with his former pastor, right? It’s a reasonable guess to make, but boy would you be so totally wrong.
 
A new NBC/WSJ poll has been released asking which of the candidates liabilities they were most concerned about.
 
Nope, neither Obama’s relationship with Wright nor with the former Weather Underground buddy made the top of the list...instead finishing a paltry fourth place among chief concerns from voters. What made the top of the list?
 
John McCain’s close alignment with President George W. Bush.
 
From MSNBC: "....according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, the bigger problem appears to be John McCain's ties to President Bush.
 
In the survey, 43 percent of registered voters say they have major concerns that McCain is too closely aligned with the current administration.
 
By comparison:
36 percent have major concerns that Clinton seems to change her position on some issues (like driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which her husband signed but which she now opposes)
 
34 percent say they’re bothered by Obama’s “bitter” remarks
 
32 percent have a major problem with the Illinois senator’s past associations with Wright and the 1960's radical William Ayers
 
27 percent have serious concerns that Bill Clinton would have too much influence on U.S. policy decisions if his wife is elected"
 
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24390690/
 
Pat Buchanan said on MSNBC that if President Bush is more unpopular than Rev. Wright, the Republicans are in a lot of trouble.
 
It's worth noting that the polling for this ended on Monday, before Obama's public denouncement of Wright.
 
I've thought all along that voters who cite Wright as a problem are voters who didn't like Obama in the first place. There was, perhaps, some doubt back in March when the issue first came up. But Obama handled it well in his Philadelphia speech on race...showed how his campaign sooo differs from the views of Wright. Wright's shenanigans last week only confirm those differences.
 
Let's get some perspective here:
Who cares about a two term president and his party who took your country into a terrible wasteful war which most people think was a bigger foreign policy mistake than Vietnam?
 
Who cares that the Bushies have molested your constitution, and with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo made the US a global brand and target for torture?
 
Who cares about the scandal of sub prime mortgages which are causing a wave of recessions across the world? Or the fact that 40 million Americans have no healthcare?
 
No, no, no...Bush and his party and their catastrophic mismanagement of everything from Iraq to Katrina to tax cuts are unimportant. The public doesn't care about them.
 
What they really care about is a local preacher in a church in Chicago who said goddam America a couple of times.
 
NOT.
 
This is also interesting -- A Media Matters for America review found that since February 27, the date that televangelist John Hagee endorsed John McCain for president, The New York Times and The Washington Post combined have published more than 12 times as many articles mentioning Rev. Wright and Barack Obama as they have mentioning Hagee and McCain.
 
http://mediamatters.org/items/200804300007?f=i_latest
 
Remember Rev. John Hagee? The one who says the Catholic church is the Whore of Babylon, and that sin is to blame for Hurricane Katrina?
 

2008/4/29

Yes, but what does it have to do with Rev. Wright?

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@ 07:43 AM (13 days, 9 hours ago)

4 Americans were killed in Iraq yesterday, 44 injured ...but watching TV you wouldn't know it. Just in case all those cable news talking heads are interested -- IF they can break away from their faux outrage over Rev. Wright's latest comments -- there is a war raging in Iraq. And it IS raging:
 
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 29, 2008; Page A10
 
"BAGHDAD, April 28 -- Four U.S. soldiers were killed in two rocket attacks in Baghdad on Monday as clashes between U.S.-backed Iraqi forces and Shiite militiamen intensified, the military said.
 
Three soldiers were killed about 1 p.m. in eastern Baghdad, where fighters loyal to anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr have battled U.S. and Iraqi troops. The fourth American soldier was killed at 4:15 p.m. in the western part of the capital, a U.S. military spokesman said. The military provided few other details about the attacks.
 
The deaths marked one of the deadliest days for U.S. troops in Iraq since Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki launched an offensive against Shiite militias in the southern city of Basra in late March, prompting retaliation there and in the vast Shiite district of Sadr City in Baghdad. Forty-four U.S. troops have died in Iraq in April, according to iCasualties.org, which tracks military fatalities, more than any month since September. [..] "
 
http://tinyurl.com/634uqb
 
Our troops are not safe in that quagmire called Iraq even in the Green Zone. In fact, the Green Zone will prolly soon become the most dangerous area of the entire city of Baghdad. What an ironic -- yet totally expected -- turn in this sad ugly saga.
 
Obviously the insurgents have changed tactics. I read that they are flush with money from the poppy harvest and they can buy rockets with longer ranges. (Remember Hezbollah's bombardment of Israel?)
 
Where does this put John McCain...given that he has no problem with keeping our military in Iraq for 100 years, as long as our troops aren't shot or harmed while stationed there?
 
Who will be the last to die for a mistake?
Whose blood will spill?
Whose heart will break?
Who will be the last to die for a mistake?
-Bruce Springsteen