There has been so much talk about Ruch Limbaugh and the comments he made on his September 26 radio show. As the above video shows, ol' Rush is now claiming that he never said he called service members who advocate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq "phony soldiers."
He now states, the comment followed a discussion of Jesse Macbeth, an anti-war activist who pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for pretending to be an injured Iraq war veteran.
Well, here's the radio program on the 26 of September; You tell me of whom Mr. Limbaugh was calling phony soldier:
Now I know that I'm not the smartest man in the world, but didn't you hear Rush agree that service members who advocate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq are "phony soldiers" and then Rush called them "phony soldiers" himself.
If you don't have an answer for this, take a look at what's being said at Army Of Dude.
Saddam Hussein was prepared to take $1 billion and go into exile before the Iraq war, according to a transcript of talks between U.S. President George W. Bush and an ally, Spanish newspaper El Pais reported on Wednesday.
During a meeting at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on February 22, 2003, Bush told former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar that Saddam could also be assassinated, according to the transcript published in El Pais in Spanish.
The Egyptians are speaking to Saddam Hussein. It seems he's indicated he would be prepared to go into exile if he's allowed to take $1 billion and all the information he wants about weapons of mass destruction," Bush was quoted as saying at the meeting one month before the U.S.-led invasion.
Asked by Aznar whether Saddam could really leave, Bush replied: "Yes, that possibility exists. Or he might even be assassinated."
Spokesperson Dana Perino was asked about the transcript published this week by the Spanish newspaper El Pais. It purports to be from a meeting just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq between President Bush and the prime minister of Spain. In it, President Bush is clearly set on a path for war, although he denied so publicly at the time.
Perino was mostly non-responsive to the questions, but notably the White House did not dispute the authenticity of the transcript:
Could it be that Bush could have avoided a war with Iraq, had he just given Saddam Hussein a one way ticket out of Iraq with $1 billion dollars? Just think we have spent more with this war, not to mention the men and women of both America and Iraq, who are dead or wounded.
My dear Rep. Nancy Pelosi, what now are you waiting for? Do we need to impeached you? How can America, be it conservative or liberal, still allow this man to occupy and office which he has caused unnecessary death, when Iraq would have been handle with respect and dignity to all concerned had America had a Kerry or Gore in the White House. Just think of all the lives lost or messed up because of this mans decisions. We should not just pass this by as rhetoric, like so many other things we have just let go by because of the necons, and the Republican party siding with this president.
Today former President Bill Clinton blasted the Republican party over the MoveOn ad. He said those same conservatives who expressed outrage about MoveOn, had likened Sen. Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden and had smeared Sen. John Kerry’s war record, during the Swift Boat ad.
"I've always said that impeachment is off the table," I think I can say that most Americans are saying, well put it back on the table. That's what we voted for and made it possible for her to become the House Leader.
She started by saying this is the President, the Vice President and now the Republican Congress war. She blamed the Senate as being closely divided and claimed she did not have the political clout or Constitutional authority to unilaterally cut war funding.
What then is her role as House leader? What exactly can she do about said war? Yes, it is true that the Senate can be stopped because of 60 votes needed to over ride the President. The House, may I remind the Congresswoman, has the majority and can set which bills will go to the Senate for a vote or vice versa.
She stated, the House could simply cut off funding for the war. "I certainly could do that. That doesn't bar the minority from bringing up a funding resolution. They have their parliamentary prerogatives as well."
The president vetoed a bill that called for troop redeployment earlier this year, and Pelosi blamed Republicans in the Senate for blocking any bills that attempted to change course in Iraq, such as a recent measure that would have guaranteed troops as much time out at home as they spent at war. It failed to receive a necessary 60 votes to move out of the Senate. So yes, she does have a point, but to not even try and blame it on not haveing the political clout or Constitutional authority to unilaterally cut war funding or anything else the Senate oppose is just not trying and giving up the fight. I'm sure that's not what Americans sent her there to do.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership team has charged a band of mostly centrist members with recommending a House Iraq strategy, pushing for the lower chamber to be the source of bipartisan action on the war. Shouldn't that have been done after she saw this President veto the bill to withdraw troops from Iraq?
We know that it is hard to get any bill pass the Senate, because we the voters failed to place more Democrats in that branch of government to do the people will. We have left enough Republicans in the Senate who are going to anything and everything they can to keep their President policies on Iraq alive.
What is it that Rep. Nancy Pelosi can do to archive the withdrawal of our troops from Iraq?
What can she do to start a honest impeachment of the President that will pass the Senate?
Let me first say, I know that this is a long post. I just hope that some will read it entirely.
America is working to build a wall at the border of Mexico, to keep illegal immigrants out. My question to the wall being built is this. Just who will build the wall?
We hire Mexicans to build our homes, upkeep our lawns, work in our Agriculture fields, clean our homes and even baby sit our children.
Maybe with the health care proposal Hillary Clinton has on the table, if she is elected President. Maybe some want mind so much about Mexicans being in America.
Thanks to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, California and Texas that once belong to Mexico, was signed over to America, including New Mexico.
I said this to point out how America is supposed to be a country of immigrants. My Great Grandmother was a Creek Indian. I am not going to lecture the fact that America belongs to the Indians and the fact that they are not complaining about Mexicans or anyone else being in this country.
How is it that our ancestors came here from all parts of the world, yet some Americans feel that any other race that is here, are here to serve them and is less of a person because of their skin color?
Which brings me to Jena 6. I know most, if not all America has heard about the problems in that small community. If not, the below video will inform the reader about what happen in Jena, Louisiana.
The trouble started under “the white tree” in front of Jena High School. The “white tree” is where the white students, 80 percent of the student body, would always sit during school breaks.
In September 2006, a Black student at Jena High School asked permission from school administrators to sit under the “white tree.” School officials advised them to sit wherever they wanted. They did.
The next day, three nooses, in the school colors, were hanging from the “white tree.” The message was clear. “Those nooses meant the KKK, they meant ‘ … we’re going to kill you, we’re going to hang you till you die,’” Casteptla Bailey, mom of one of the students, told the London Observer.
The Jena High School principal found that three white students were responsible and recommended expulsion. The white superintendent of schools overruled the principal and gave the students a three day suspension saying that the nooses were just a youthful stunt. “Adolescents play pranks,” the superintendent told the Chicago Tribune. “I don’t think it was a threat against anybody.”
Black students decided to resist and organized a sit-in under the “white tree” at the school to protest the light suspensions given to the noose-hanging white students.
The white district attorney then came to Jena High with law enforcement officers to address a school assembly. According to testimony in a later motion in court, the DA reportedly threatened the Black protesting students saying that if they didn’t stop making a fuss about this “innocent prank… I can be your best friend or your worst enemy. I can take away your lives with a stroke of my pen.” The school was put on lockdown for the rest of the week.
On the night of Thursday, Nov. 30, 2006, a still unsolved fire burned down the main academic building of Jena High School.
On Friday night, Dec. 1, a Black student who showed up at a white party was beaten by whites. On Saturday, Dec. 2, a young white man pulled out a shotgun in a confrontation with young Black men at the Gotta Go convenience store outside Jena before the men wrestled it away from him. The Black men who took the shotgun away were later arrested. No charges were filed against the white man.
On Monday, Dec. 4, at Jena High, a white student — who allegedly had been making racial taunts, including calling African American students “n———” while supporting the students who hung the nooses and who beat up the Black student at the off-campus party — was knocked down, punched and kicked by Black students. The white victim was taken to the hospital treated and released. He attended a social function that evening.
Six Black Jena students were arrested and charged with attempted second degree murder. All six were expelled from school.
The six charged were: 17-year-old Robert Bailey Jr., whose bail was set at $138,000; 17-year-old Theo Shaw — bail $130,000; 18-year-old Carwin Jones — bail $100,000; 17-year-old Bryant Purvis — bail $70,000; Mychal Bell, a sophomore in high school who was charged as an adult and for whom bail was set at $90,000; and a still unidentified minor.
Many of the young men, who came to be known as the Jena 6, stayed in jail for months. Few families could afford bond or private attorneys.
Mychal Bell remained in jail from December 2006 until his trial because his family was unable to post the $90,000 bond. Theo Shaw has also remained in jail. Several of the other defendants remained in jail for months until their families could raise sufficient money to put up bonds.
On the morning of the trial, the DA reduced the charges from attempted second-degree murder to second-degree aggravated battery and conspiracy. Aggravated battery in Louisiana law demands the attack be with a dangerous weapon. The dangerous weapon? The prosecutor was allowed to argue to the jury that the tennis shoes worn by Bell could be considered a dangerous weapon used by “the gang of Black boys” who beat the white victim.
Most shocking of all, when the pool of potential jurors was summoned, 50 people appeared — every single one of them white.
The LaSalle Parish clerk defended the all-white group to the Alexandria Louisiana Town Talk newspaper, saying that the jury pool was selected by computer. “The venire [panel of prospective jurors] is color blind. The idea is for the list to truly reflect the racial makeup of the community, but the system does not take race into factor.” Officials said they had summoned 150 people, but these were the only people who showed up.
The all-white jury which was finally chosen included two people friendly with the district attorney, a relative of one of the witnesses and several others who were friends of prosecution witnesses.
The jury deliberated for less than three hours and found Mychal Bell guilty on the maximum possible charges of aggravated second- degree battery and conspiracy. He faces up to a maximum of 22 years in prison.
What happened to the white guys? The white victim of the beating was later arrested for bringing a hunting rifle loaded with 13 bullets onto the high school campus and released on $5,000 bond. The white man who beat up the Black youth at the off-campus party was arrested and charged with simple battery. The white students who hung up the nooses in the “white tree” were never charged.
This all brought a march in Jena, Louisiana last week with patisipants from all around the country. The video below details what happen after the march.
A teenager was arrested Thursday when police allegedly found hangman's nooses dangling from the rear of his pickup truck after he drove past a crowd of people who had attended a civil rights march earlier in the day.
The incident in Alexandria, La., took place only hours after tens of thousands of civil rights marchers demonstrated in nearby Jena on behalf of six teens charged with beating a white schoolmate at Jena High School.
Jeremiah Munsen, 18, of Colfax, La., and a 16-year-old passenger in his truck were arrested Thursday night near a bus station where a group of people who had marched in Jena were waiting for buses to take them home.
One of the Grant Parish teenagers arrested Thursday night in connection with a red pickup truck driving through downtown Alexandria with nooses tied to it was released on bond from the Rapides Parish jail Friday morning.
Jeremiah Munsen, 18 of Colfax, had his bond set at $1,670 after being charged with driving while intoxicated, inciting to riot and contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile, according to an Alexandria Police Department report.
The 16-year-old, who was being held in a juvenile detention facility Friday, told police he had a "KKK" tattoo on his chest and said some of his relatives were involved in the Ku Klux Klan, according to a police report.
Officers found an unloaded .22-caliber rifle and a set of brass knuckles in Munsen's truck, police said.
Nooses figured into the controversy that drew tens of thousands of people to Jena, a small town about 40 miles northeast of Alexandria.
On Friday a request that Mychal Bell the black teenager arrested in the beating of a white youth be released from jail was denied.
The only one of the six yet to stand trial. Mr. Bell was convicted of aggravated second-degree battery this summer, but the conviction was thrown out last week by a Louisiana appeals court, which ruled that he had been mistakenly tried as an adult.
America cannot continue to allow such behavior by its Justice System, to deny equal justice and protection for all its people. It cannot continue to allow racism, as shown in Jena, to occur over and over, then claim this is just one instance. It's one instance too many and it must stop.
We cant continue to call America, the Land of the free, when we want walls built to keep out the people that produce the very food we eat. We cannot continue to call America, the Land of the free, when we attack and abuse a race of people with racism, simply because of their skin color. Right is right and wrong is wrong and America has been wrong for a long time now.
Keith Olbermann, last night delivered one of his Special Comments on his show, Countdown.
Mr. Bush, you have hidden behind the General's skirts, and today you have hidden behind the skirts of 'the last question' at a news conference, to indicate once again that your presidency has been about the tilted playing field, about no rules for your party in terms of character assassination and changing the fabric of our nation, and no right for your opponents or critics to as much as respond."
That, Sir, is not only unAmerican -- it is dictatorial.
And in **pimping** General David Petraeus, Sir, in violation of everything this country has been assiduously and vigilantly against for 220 years, you have tried to blur the gleaming **radioactive** demarcation between the military and the political, and to portray **your** party as the one associated with the military, and your opponents as the ones somehow antithetical to it.
Above is a copy of my new site called, Let's Talk God and yes it is a Religious site.
What I really need is the help for this site, Let's Talk. As you can see, I've changed templates because I was planning to use the old template on my new site at some point.
The help I need is, anyone with a browser other than IE7. Can you please inform me of any parts of this template that's not correct, such as sidebar not being on the left side or being at the bottom of the template.
Thanks in advance!
Let me Thank Floyd, over at within reason for this nice template. The site for said templates is called Blogcrowds, feel free to look over the different templates at the site, you might find one that you like. They are free!
Bill Maher, talked with Wolf Blitzer, in the Situation Room about the war in Iraq, President Bush and Gen Petraeus, the reasons the Democrats have failed to bring a stop to Iraq, Sen Larry Craig skit on his show, Real Time and a host of other topics.
Bill brought the truth out about the Democrats not being able to stop this war, simply because they just do not have enough votes to do so. He suggests that we go back to the voting booths and elect more Democrats to office to make changes with their votes.
Bill Maher discussed the MoveOn ad, and how the Republicans brought up Hillary Clinton, in the middle of the situation to keep all concentration away from President Bush and General Petraeus. The surge and the report by General Petraeus was nothing more than a Bush doctrine. Most, if not all Democrats already knew what his report would be about and as always, the President and his hand pick people, did not let us down.
President Bush and General Petraeus lied to America, when they said, they would be withdrawing 30,000 troops by the end of next Summer. It's a law and a fact that 30,000 troops that will be coming home next Summer is legally bound to come home without any act by General Petraeus or President Bush.
We cannot continue to allow our leaders to think that we are ignorant to the point that we cannot know a lie when they tell them. I for one, am sick of such insults.
It's great to be back at Let's Talk, trying to Blog. Hello all and I must say that I missed the site's I frequently visit and I surely missed the comment sections.
Speaking of comments. I received a comment from a new reader to Let's Talk. The comment said, I should introduce both sides of a story, which would make Let's Talk, seem more credible. So today, I shall present both sides to a very simple story.
Sally Fields was accepting a Emmy award the other night and the Fox channel...well I will let you be the judge of this.
Fox TV
Canadian TV
Was there really a difference in what Fox showed and what the Canadian CTV showed, What say you?
Reductions in violence form the centerpiece of the Bush administration's claim that its war strategy is working.
Army Gen. David H. Petraeus has indicated a willingness to consider a drawdown of one brigade of between 3,500 and 4,500 U.S. troops from Iraq early next year, with more to follow over the next months based on conditions on the ground, according to a senior U.S. official.
A senior military officer in Iraq said there will be no written presentation to the president on security and stability in Iraq. “There is no report. It is an assessment provided by them by testimony,” the officer said.
The only hard copy will be Gen. Petraeus’ opening statement to Congress, scheduled for Monday, along with any charts he will use in explaining the results of the troop surge in Baghdad over the past several months.
The GAO report found that "average number of daily attacks against civilians have remained unchanged from February to July 2007," a conclusion that the military said was skewed because it did not include dramatic, up-to-date information from August. In other words, it did not say what the Bush Administration wanted to hear.
Gen. Jones: ‘Yes,’ we can begin to withdraw from Iraq. In a House Armed Services Committee hearing this afternoon, Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO) asked Gen. James Jones to comment on his report’s recommendation that the U.S. should reduce its footprint in Iraq. The Jones report suggests “significant reductions” in the “size of our national footprint in Iraq.” Skelton asked Jones if this is a call to reduce troop levels, and Jones answered yes.
The pullouts would be contingent on the ability of U.S. and Iraqi forces to sustain what the administration heralds as recent gains in security and to make further gains in stabilizing Iraq.
What it comes down to for this Administration is a fact, that Bush will keep the troops in Iraq until he has left office. Leaving or passing the Iraq mess on to the next President and Mr. Bush will be a former President out of office making millions on speeches.
Meanwhile America, with the right President, House and Senate, will try to undo the damage the former President, and the former Republican House and Senate made. This will probably last for the next ten (10), or 15 years before this country is out of the red. It seems everything this President has ever done, has ended in failure.
Bill Maher appears with the host of Hardball, Chris Matthews and talks about Larry Craig and layovers in airports. The interview gets really hilarious when Chris shows what Bill Maher had on his show lasts Friday, about Larry Craig and Chris Matthews during former President Clinton term in office.
Chris and Bill go from Craig to President Bush and the surge. The secret visit of Bush's trip to Iraq is also discussed.
Bill has a funny way of telling the truth about Bush, the way most Democrats see him. The author of "Dead Certain", Robert Draper is discussed and Bill is asked about the money Bush thinks about making when his term is up as President.
Chris Matthews, changes the subject and ask Maher about whom he could not stand to be the next President and Bill gives Chris a negative view of both Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani.
And so he is back from his annual surprise gratuitous photo-op in Iraq, and what a sorry spectacle it was. But it was nothing compared to the spectacle of one unfiltered, unguarded, horrifying quotation in the new biography to which Mr. Bush has consented.
As he deceived the troops at Al-Asad Air Base yesterday with the tantalizing prospect that some of them might not have to risk being killed and might get to go home, Mr. Bush probably did not know that, with his own words, he had already proved that he had been lying, is lying and will be lying about Iraq.
He presumably did not know that there had already appeared those damning excerpts from Robert Draper's book “Dead Certain."
“I'm playing for October-November," Mr. Bush said to Draper. That, evidently, is the time during which, he thinks he can sell us the real plan, which is “to get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence."
Comfortable, that is, with saying about Iraq, again quoting the President, “stay... longer."
And there it is. We've caught you. Your goal is not to bring some troops home, maybe, if we let you have your way now. Your goal is not to set the stage for eventual withdrawal. You are, to use your own disrespectful, tone-deaf word, playing at getting the next Republican nominee to agree to jump into this bottomless pit with you, and take us with him, as we stay in Iraq for another year, and another, and another, and anon.
Everything you said about Iraq yesterday, and everything you will say, is a deception, for the purpose of this one cynical, unacceptable, brutal goal: perpetuating this war indefinitely.
War today, war tomorrow, war forever!
And you are playing at it! Playing!
A man with any self respect, having inadvertently revealed such an evil secret, would have already resigned and fled the country! You have no remaining credibility about Iraq.
And yet, yesterday at Al-Asad, Mr. Bush kept playing, and this time, using the second of his two faces.
The president told reporters, “They (General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker) tell me if the kind of success we are now seeing continues, it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces."
And so, Mr. Bush got his fraudulent headlines today. “Bush May Bring Some Troops Home."
While the reality is, we know from what he told Draper, that the president's true hope is that they will not come home; but that they will stay there, because he is keeping them there now, in hope that those from his political party fighting to succeed him will prolong this unendurable disaster into the next decade.
But, to a country dying of thirst, the president seemed to vaguely promise a drink from a full canteen -- a promise predicated on the assumption that he is not lying.
Yet you are lying, Mr. Bush. Again. But now, we know why.
You gave away more of yourself than you knew in the Draper book. And you gave away more still, on the arduous trip back out of Iraq hours in the air, without so much as a single vacation.
“If you look at my comments over the past eight months," you told reporters, “it's gone from a security situation in the sense that we're either going to get out and there will be chaos, or, more troops. Now, the situation has changed, where I'm able to speculate on the hypothetical."
Mr. Bush, the only "hypothetical" here is that you are not now holding our troops hostage. You have no intention of withdrawing them. But that doesn't mean you can't pretend you're thinking about it, does it?
That is your genius as you see it, anyway. You can deduce what we want. We, the people, remember us? And then use it against us.
You can hold that canteen up and promise it to the parched nation. And the untold number of Americans whose lives have not been directly blighted by Iraq or who do not realize that their safety has been reduced and not increased by Iraq, they will get the bullet points: "Bush is thinking about bringing some troops home. Bush even went to Iraq."
You can fool some of the people all of the time, can't you, Mr. Bush? You are playing us!
And as for the most immediate victims of the president's perfidy and shameless manipulation of those troops -- yesterday sweating literally as he spoke at Al-Asad Air Base -- tonight, again sweating figuratively in The Valley Of The Shadow Of Death, the president saved, for them, the most egregious "playing" in the entire trip.
“I want to tell you this about the decision, about my decision about troop levels. Those decisions will be based on a calm assessment by our military commanders on the conditions on the ground, not a nervous reaction by Washington politicians to poll results in the media."
One must compliment Mr. Bush's writer. That, perhaps, was the mostly perfectly-crafted phrase of his presidency. For depraved indifference to democracy, for the craven projection of political motives onto those trying to save lives and save a nation, for a dismissal of the value of the polls and the importance of the media, for a summary of all he does not hold dear about this nation or its people nothing could top that.
As if you listened to all the "calm assessments" of our military commanders rather than firing the ones who dared say the emporer has no clothes, and the president, no judgment.
As if your entire presidency was not a “nervous reaction," and you yourself, nothing but a Washington politician.
As if “"he media" does not largely divide into those parts your minions are playing, and those others who unthinkingly and uncritically serve as your echo chamber, at a time when the nation's future may depend on the airing of dissent.
And as if those polls were not so overwhelming, and not so clearly reflective of the nation's agony and the nation's insistence.
But this president has ceased to listen. This president has decided that night is day, and death is life, and enraging the world against us is safety. And this laziest of presidents, actually interrupted his precious time off to fly to Iraq to play at a photo opportunity with soldiers, some of whom will on his orders be killed before the year maybe the month is out.
Just over 500 days remain in this presidency. Consider the dead who have piled up on the battlefield in these last 500 days.
Consider the singular fraudulence of this president's trip to Iraq yesterday, and the singular fraudulence of the selling of the Petraeus Report in these last 500 days.
Consider how this president has torn away at the fabric of this nation in a manner of which terrorists can only dream in these last 500 days.
And consider again how this president has spoken to that biographer: that he is “playing for October-November." The goal in Iraq is “to get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence." Consider how this revelation contradicts every other rationale he has offered in these last 500 days.
In the context of all that now, consider these next 500 days.
Mr. Bush, our presence in Iraq must end. Even if it means your resignation. Even if it means your impeachment. Even if it means a different Republican to serve out your term. Even if it means a Democratic Congress and those true patriots among the Republicans standing up and denying you another penny for Iraq, other than for the safety and the safe conduct home of our troops.
This country cannot run the risk of what you can still do to this country in the next 500 days.
