Thanks to The Reality-Based Community for this story, Fort Lewis to consolidate memorials for dead
Fort Lewis, which this month has suffered its worst losses of the war, will no longer conduct individual memorial ceremonies for soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Instead, the post will hold one ceremony for all soldiers killed each month, the Fort Lewis acting commanding general, Brig. Gen. William Troy, wrote in a memo to commanders and staff last week.
“As much as we would like to think otherwise, I am afraid that with the number of soldiers we now have in harm’s way, our losses will preclude us from continuing to do individual memorial ceremonies,”
What I actually went over to RBC for was this summary of the latest news about Valerie Plame Wilson and Fitzgerald’s filings in regards to Libby’s sentencing, From the sentencing memorandum and supporting documents
. In summary – Cheney, Rove and Libby are traitors by any reasonable defintion and GOP candidate Fred Thompson thinks that the person who was convicted of lying to cover up the crimes of this administration should be pardoned. The Next Hurrah has more, I Present to You: Saint Libby
Remember that Bush, that great architect of middle-east peace otherwise known as the Decider, didn’t know the difference between Sunni and Shia when he decided to pull weapons inspectors out of Iraq is also the same Decider that just knows for a fact that Iraq, the country he turned into a failed chaotic mess will fall into the hands of al-Qaeda if U.S. forces are redeployed, Sunni Insurgents Battle in Baghdad – Residents of Western Neighborhood Join Groups’ Fight Against Al-Qaeda in Iraq
Sunni residents of a west Baghdad neighborhood used assault rifles and a roadside bomb to battle the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq this week, leaving at least 28 people dead and six injured, residents said Thursday.
The mayor of the Amiriyah neighborhood, Mohammed Abdul Khaliq, said in a telephone interview that residents were rising up to try to expel al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has alienated other Sunnis with its indiscriminate violence and attacks on members of its own sect.
“I think this is going to be the end of the al-Qaeda presence here,” Abdul Khaliq said of the fighting Wednesday and Thursday, which began over accusations that al-Qaeda in Iraq had executed Sunnis without reason.
Of course this marginally associated group that calls itself al-Qaeda in Iraq wouldn’t be there at all if Bush hadn’t let them in by kicking the inspectors out. Jim DeMint, rumored to be an adult and is an actual Republican Senator from South Carolina thinks lots of deep thoughts about Iraq. The problem is that while thinking said thoughts he wears his tin foil hat a little too tight, Jim DeMint is the Real ‘Wimp’ Here
Wimps are people like Senator DeMint who don’t want to ask the tough questions or face facts, which is why he’s idiotically clinging to the idea that there were WMD in Iraq. Any stockpiles of weapons found in Iraq were useless — either inert or rusted and unusable because of their age.
Senator DeMint is living in some sort of twisted fantasy land, where democracy, not failed policy, is responsible for too many American lives lost in Iraq, and where bad intelligence is miraculously valid. He should click his ruby slippers three times and join us back in the land of reality, or resign from the Senate.
Republicans have been the Wimp Party since Richard Nixon, something that is important to understand about them since many of their policies are not predicated on what is good for America, but what will give them the bright shine of machismo. They have been and judging by their crop of presidential candidates will continue to be the Party of Insecurity. They’re like every insecure bully ever known more genetically related to the puffer fish then the rhinoceros.
“This Congress must void the blank check the White House has enjoyed for the last six years,” said Rep. Nadler. “The time for real accountability and meaningful oversight is now, and this Subcommittee will fulfill its constitutional duty to protect the fundamental freedoms of all Americans.”
Topics to be covered by the hearings include:
· The National Security Agency’s wiretapping program and proposed expansions;
· The erosion of Habeas Corpus through the Military Commissions Act;
· The sanctioning of torture through the Military Commissions Act and other government policies;
· The practice of “extraordinary rendition,” or government sponsored kidnapping;
· PATRIOT Act threats to privacy rights, including the FBI’s abuses of the National Security Letter authority and intrusions into Americans’ “Freedom to Read”;
· Government surveillance of First Amendment-protected activities; and
· The gutting of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights and Voting Rights Divisions.
For those Dems, independents and liberal libertarians that are already impatient with Democrats just review that list. Think about it this way. If you’ve ever built one of those large complex sand castles you remeber that it took you most of the day, it only took one wave at high tide to wipe it out. Bush and his complicit Republican Congress blew into town and like that wave only took a few short years to destroy what it took over two hundred years to build. It’s going to take a little time to undo the damage.
Poison used in China is found in U.S.-made animal feed
Ever since pet food contaminated with an industrial chemical was traced to shipments of wheat flour from China, U.S. officials have concentrated on cracking down on imports.
It turns out the problem was closer to home, too.
U.S. officials said Wednesday that a manufacturing plant in Ohio was using the same banned substance, melamine, to make binding agents that ended up in feed for farmed fish, shrimp and livestock.
Fear is the most powerful enemy of reason. Both fear and reason are essential to human survival, but the relationship between them is unbalanced. Reason may sometimes dissipate fear, but fear frequently shuts down reason. As Edmund Burke wrote in England twenty years before the American Revolution, “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”
Our Founders had a healthy respect for the threat fear poses to reason. They knew that, under the right circumstances, fear can trigger the temptation to surrender freedom to a demagogue promising strength and security in return. They worried that when fear displaces reason, the result is often irrational hatred and division. As Justice Louis D. Brandeis later wrote: “Men feared witches and burnt women.”
from The Assault on Reason by Al Gore
The Long Goodbye 
