Happy X-mas (War Is Over) - John Lennon
Just received my daily Smirking Chimp e-mail and the reviews are not good for President Obama's announced escalation. And I wonder if the Afghans were consulted. A sample:
Some forty-five years after the passage of the first civil rights legislation guided into law by JFK and LBJ, the civil rights and peace movements tower as monuments to American progress.
Update: McClatchy Newspapers reports Obama to go the LBJ route, 34,000 more troops. If true, perhaps Obama can run in 2012 on a platform of 'not as many dead.' Nice job, Mr. President!
Get Palin2012-2014½ bumper stickers.
With the rise of the public relations industry American politics—from the municipal alderperson to the chief executive—has been reduced to the point where a vacuous Sarah Palin can be talked about as a contender for the president of the United States.
Growing up in Wisconsin during the Bart Starr-coached years (1975-1983), I used to grimace as Bart announced that a new draft pick is a "good Christian."So reads a report by the Pew Center on the States. Download the report on Wisconsin.
Wisconsin: To most, Wisconsin does not seem to have the same' [...]
Update: "Do we call Afghanistan a war? It is more like Detroit," says a Marine veteran.
Black women are the fasting growing demographic leaping ahead from 2004 to 2008 with the highest voter turnout rate in November's election (Pew Research Center).
Reading Jeff Gates' Today’s Ancient Warfare: Facts vs. Beliefs, a related question that always presents itself in reading analyses of propaganda and thought control and other systems employed to dissolve a target population's capacity to think is: Those opinionmakers and policymakers in a position to [...] 
On the matter of the pending Afghanistan escalation, a Vietnam War elite Marine combat veteran shoots down this foolish idea of sending in more troops and delaying withdrawal, and proposes direct negotiations with the Taliban in Scotland [Robbie the Pict of [...] 
A constant in America over the last four years—epitomized in Wisconsin—is the startlingly anxious mood of the electorate.
As cable-TV know-nothings wail on about Virginia and New Jersey, Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz offer a sober analysis in the Times in Teixeira's column.
President Obama,
I respect President Obama being photographed honoring our troops, our killed-in-action troops arriving home in flag-draped coffins. George W. Bush banned the press from photographing troops arriving home in such a fashion; and he would not be seen next to a coffin as the fallen would [...] 
I had the honor in 2002 of interviewing Spanish Civil War combat veteran Clarence Kailin for CounterPunch marking the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Memorial in Madison, Wisconsin's James Madison Park. Clarence Kailin, one of the last surviving Americans who fought from 1936 to 1939 for the [...] 
Why spare words? The Pentagon will lie for more war in Afghanistan, a policy being deliberated as we read. As citizens, speak the truth or you will make one hell of a lot of new victims. Plenty of places to wage war over and over, if [...] 
Today is the final day for public comment on proposed VA rules the VA says will streamline PTSD diagnosis and broaden the scope of circumstances under which a veteran proves his combat experience. As with the current, contrived PTSD diagnosis, many see the rule as [...] 
Funny picture from a Marine friend in China Beach, 1969 but the young sent off to war for lies don't come home the same.
Congressman Robert Wexler:
Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin publicly accused Mikey Weinstein of engaging in a "demonic” agenda against the forces of Jesus Christ at an event held at Fort Bragg in August 2008.Check out Bill Moyers' piece provoking ruminations of how well-armed its readers and viewers are.
The global economic crisis in September 2008 has not spurred the sweeping reforms crafted to prevent another financial collapse and hold bad-faith players accountable.
Huge monied interests have apparently [we don't actually know] blocked [...]
Senator John McCain is the central front in the War on Error.
The Navy announced yesterday that the civil rights leader Medgar Evers will be honored today with a Navy supply ship named for Evers.
President Obama appears committed to a foolish and depraved course of action in Afghanistan.
Gore Vidal served in the U.S. Army Reserve during World War II, emerging as an eloquent critic of American foreign policy over the last 60 years, among his myriad accomplishments.
Demonstrated anew is the fact that we live in a democracy where a small group of people can lie us into war to devastating consequences [See Iran, Lessons of Iraq, for example]—burning $ trillions and traumatising a generation of American troops.
Health care is going to pass, and we are going to be fine.Update: NYT/CBS Poll: 30 percent favorable view of GOP in Congress; 47 percent favorable view of Dems. By margin of 52 percent to 27 percent, Americans say Obama better on health care reform than GOP. Hope everyone gets past the misleading headline, "In Poll, Public Wary of Obama" [...]
Sarah Palin made a splash yesterday showing her grasp of the global economic crisis is on a par with her mastery of biological evolution.
A Madison-based company and its employees joined forces to help ensure that Dane county remains among the best places to live.A Madison-based company and its employees joined forces to help ensure that Dane county remains among the best places to live.
Read Dan Brown's new book, The Lost Symbol (DoubleDay, 2009), and a passage hit home like Lewis Lapham during the Bush years.
Three years ago a street was named in Aurora, Illinois in honor of the city's first Latino police officer who was murdered on September 20, 1970.
Two Wisconsin veterans will be among those awarded "for their lifetimes of activism on Oct. 3 by the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice (WNPJ), a statewide network of 170 organizations working for social change."
Update: See Media Matters - Fox News openly advocates against Democratic Congress, White House and watch Beck's Witch Hunt: The New McCarthyism.
Update: See Roger Bybee's piece at In These Times: "(W)orkers and their families soon came under enormous pressure to reconsider [the new contract with 'more than 170 changes' as] ... unbearable pressure ... [and] profound worry about their families' futures" seized the (IAM) Local [...] 
Zap and Pow. Salon lists the U.S. Senate "knuckleheads," and Herb Kohl makes the list. From the Salon staff:
Maddie is a five-year-old Newfoundland with a heart as large as her bulk.
