The Hollywood Liberal

Bush gives secret order for covert war with Iran

The Blue State
Excerpt
Intelligence officials leaked to the Blotter that President Bush has given a classified order to the CIA allowing them to wage covert war in Iran:

The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a “nonlethal presidential finding” that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions.

This is analogous to the 2002 order that Bush gave the CIA prior to the official start of war in Iraq.

News Items:
Richmond Register
Guiliani and OxyContin
AP
Giuliani’s clients could pose conflict

See The Rest of the Comic Here.

How you all doing out there. Just a quick note to say that I am trying to get back to doing the Comics.
It’s been a long time since I was able to do one. Unfortunately they will no longer let me use the internet at work so it seriously curtails my time to work on the site. (I miss the old days where I could spend as much time as necessary on them before I had a full time job.) I have been extremely busy lately, but am dedicated to getting more work done on the site. I have ideas for 2 comics right now and will try to do them tomorrow. (If I am not working at another job) Stay tuned for more good stuff from the HL. Meanwhile here are a couple of other stories (and a Comic flashback) Talk to you soon.

White House: Planned pay gains too costly

Stars and Stripes
Excerpt
As the House of Representatives prepared to pass its fiscal 2008 defense authorization bill, the White House urged lawmakers to reconsider a host of costly personnel initiatives added by the Armed Services Committee.

Initiatives opposed by the White House included:
Bigger pay raises

The House was set to vote for a 3.5 percent basic pay increase for January 2008. That’s 0.5 percent higher than proposed by the Bush administration. The House would continue a string of annual raises set 0.5 percent higher than private sector wage growth through at least 2012.

The “unnecessary” extra half-percentage bump in pay would cost $265 million in 2008 and $7.3 billion over six years, budget officials complained.

“When combined with the overall military benefit package, the President’s proposal provides a good quality of life for service members and their families,” said the OMB letter to committee leaders.

Both House Republicans and Democrats disagreed. Rep. Thelma Drake, R-Va., offered the amendment, adopted by the armed services committees, to stretch the string of bigger raises out to 2012.

HL’s Take
There he goes again…Supporting the troops as usual. Bush is also against Increasing Widows Benefits What a Patriot, what a super Patriot, so
Bush doesn’t want to give the troops extra money for putting there lives on the line to support his lies lies lies. That would mean a few less dollars in his wallet. Way to go Georgie showing his true colors (green)

White House to quickly replace Wolfowitz

AP
Excerpt
WASHINGTON - Trying to put a controversy behind it, the Bush administration was wasting no time finding a successor to
World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, who will resign over his handling of a pay package for his girlfriend.

Wolfowitz on Thursday announced that he would step down at the end of June, his leadership undermined by a furor over the compensation he arranged in 2005 for Shaha Ali Riza, a bank employee.

His departure ends a two-year run at the development bank that was marked by controversy from the start, given his previous role as a major architect of the Iraq war when he served as the No. 2 official at the Pentagon.

It also ends a potential political headache for President Bush, who had named Wolfowitz to the post.

HL’s Take
Potential political headache for Bush they say? More like an actual headache for Bush (along with his many other headaches) that has been going on for the last month and a half. Ah good old AP still covering for the murder monkey and trying to take the heat off of him in any way possible. So who will Bush appoint next? Using the HL formula of predicting the future just think of the worst possible choice, and that will probably be the guy…Well let’s see…Hitler’s dead, so it won’t be him. Cheney still has a job….Hmm sounds like a good idea for another comic. Meantime Bush’s headaches won’t go away any time soon just as we showed in this comic from back on October 6, 2005 called Does This Man Look Happy? In which I also successfully predicted that Bush would be moving to South America after his term. I just got the country wrong. (I said Brazil, not Paraguay.) Check it out.

Get the story before it happens. Read HLs Comics

If you are going to the movies this weekend, check this one out…

“‘THE OFFICE’ MEETS ‘THE HILLS HAVE EYES’. Good gory fun with plenty
of laughs.” – Dennis Dermody, Paper.

“The stylish slasher thrills are scarier than a trust fall.” – Troy Patterson, Spin

See the First 3 Minutes of the film.

‘ Obama to Support Feingold-Reid Bill

Bob Geiger.com
Excerpt
linois Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama today announced that he will support the Feingold-Reid bill to end funding for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq in March of 2008.

“Today, 1518 days after it began, the war in Iraq rages on, with no sign of a resolution,” said Obama in a statement. “The Iraqi people appear no closer to the settling their differences. The Iraqi government is more divided and dysfunctional than ever. The Iraqi parliament speaks of adjourning for the summer, without addressing the major issues standing in the way of a ceasefire. And our brave young servicemen and women are still fighting and dying to police someone else’s civil war.”

“I opposed this war from the start for all the reasons that are now clear.”

Here’s the rest of the statement:

‘Appropriate’ force used in civilian death incident: US

AP
Excerpt
A US military commander used “appropriate level of force” during a battle last month in western Afghanistan in which dozens of civilians were reported killed, a senior US military official said Wednesday.

Brigadier General Perry Wiggins defended the actions of the commander on the scene as necessary and appropriate to protect his unit, which came under attack April 27 and 29 in the remote Zerkoh valley in Herat province.

Air strikes were called in by the US special operations forces during the fighting, and Afghan and UN officials later said as many as 50 civilians, including women and children, were killed.

“The on scene commander demonstrated sound judgement throughout the engagement,” Wiggins told reporters here.

“All targets were positively identified as hostile, (and) were under observation at the time of the engagement,” he said. “The on scene commander used appropriate level of force to respond to the continuous enemy threat and protect his unit.”

Wiggins said he did not know whether the US military had established how many, if any, civilians were killed in the fighting.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who protested after the event that civilian casualties had reached “unacceptable levels,” visited the Zerkoh valley on Wednesday and told villagers he had told foreign forces to take more care.

The commander of the unit was not identified.

Wiggins, the deputy operations director of the Joint Staff, said the legal findings made no mention of civilian casualties.

The coalition initially denied there had been civilian casualties, saying 136 Taliban fighters were killed. It said later it was investigating.

HLs Take
No, no civilians were killed I swear….oh they were…well thats ok it was appropriate anyway, no need to investigate

Report says soldiers were not protected

AP
Excerpt
WASHINGTON - Three U.S. soldiers slaughtered in a grisly kidnapping-murder plot south of Baghdad last June had been left alone for up to 36 hours in a poorly planned mission, a military investigation concluded. Two officers have been relieved of their commands.

Neither of the officers faced criminal charges as a result of the litany of mistakes that left the soldiers exposed, a military official familiar with the investigation told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

A report on the investigation said the platoon leader and company commander — whose names were not released — failed to provide proper supervision to the unit or enforce military standards.

A seven-page summary of the investigation provided to the AP also said it appears insurgents may have rehearsed the attack two days earlier, and that Iraqi security forces near the soldiers’ outpost probably saw and heard the attack and “chose to not become an active participant in the attack on either side.”

“This was an event caused by numerous acts of complacency, and a lack of standards at the platoon level,” said the investigating officer, Lt. Col. Timothy Daugherty, in the summary.

Pentagon bans US troops from using YouTube

Telegraph UK
Excerpt
The Pentagon will from today ban soldiers serving overseas from using popular video-sharing and social networking websites, claiming they are a security risk.

US soldier in Iraq; Pentagon bans US soldiers from sharing messages on YouTube and MySpace
The Pentagon will continue to post its own videos on networking websites

The US defence department said videos, recordings and messages uploaded by troops in the field on to YouTube, MySpace and 11 other websites posed a “significant operational security challenge”, and a drag on the military’s computer network. …
The US army, meanwhile, will continue to post videos on YouTube showing soldiers defeating insurgents and befriending Iraqis.

HL’s Take
“significant operational security challenge”, they call it. Yeah right. How can they lie about how good things are over there, when we can see the videos and know they are lying.
They don’t want the truth to get out about how inept they are, remember this one for example.

Or how about this one.

Here is a map of all the wildfires currently burning in Florida. I found this on What Really Happened.com Notice how all the areas where wildfires are burning are where the Republicans live, and all the areas that are not burning. (Southeast part of the state, like Miami) are where the Democrats mostly live. More bad Karma for foisting the Bush nightmare on us all. Actually California has already had a few fires and it’s only May. The fire season doesn’t usually start until late August. That’s because we had no rain this winter. The driest Winter ever in L.A. which means that we will be having lots of fires all summer long. One more sign of the global warming catastrophe coming our way.

Two Immigrants Say U.S. Agents Drugged Them

NPR
Excerpt
In Los Angeles, the unusual case of two immigrants whose deportations were botched by U.S. immigration officials has allowed a rare glimpse into internal proceedings within the Department of Homeland Security.

The men say that U.S. immigration officials drugged them in order to ease their removal from the country — but airline officials ultimately put a stop to the deportations.

Both immigrants are back in Los Angeles, appealing their deportations. And they’ve now obtained government medical records that seem to confirm their accounts.

One of the men, Raymond Soeoth, is a Christian minister from Indonesia who came to the United States in 1999 to flee religious persecution. But on Dec. 7, 2004, immigration agents told him he was going to be deported.

Soeoth says that an agent asked him if he needed medication to relax him for the trip. He replied that he did not. But a few hours later, says Soeoth, several agents came into his cell. One of them, he says, was a medic. He was holding a syringe.

“Two officers grabbed my legs, two officers grabbed my hands. Then they opened my pants. And then I said, ‘Why are you guys doing this to me?’ and I was crying and crying, and I said ‘Why? I’m not animal.’”

Church’s Sign Against Islam Sparks Controversy

WRAL Raliegh
Excerpt
Spring Hope — Words like “bomb” and “die” draw attention to the small sign in front of Good News Independent Baptist Church.

Rev. Gary Murrell put up the sign, which on one side claims the message of Islam is “submit, convert or die.”

The other side reads: “When is the last time you heard of a Jew or Christian with a bomb strapped to their body?”

Despite some in the Islamic community who claim the sign is offensive, Murrell says it is not a hate sign.

“It was not put up there with the purpose of showing that we hate those people,” he said. “It’s not the people, it’s the religion.”

Murrell says it is a violent religion compared to Christianity. But not everyone agrees.

“I would really say that the actions of one individual really do not represent the Islamic faith,” said Debbie Jaunich, with the Islamic Center of Raleigh. “The Islamic faith really calls for peace.”

“It’s sad to see that we still have this kind of ignorance in the community about the Islamic faith,” she added.

Murrell says he is trying to make people think but Jaunich said she thinks it breeds discrimination and bigotry

Karl Rove Directed DOJ Voter Suppression Project

True Blue Liberal
Excerpt
The McClatchy Newspapers report today that in the final weeks before the midterm Congressional elections of November 2006, presidential political advisor Karl Rove orchestrated a large-scale effort to suppress voter turnout among potentially Democratic constituencies, leveraging Department of Justice resources in the process. Key to the project were P. Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales’s chief of staff, and Matthew Friedrich, then chief of staff in the Department’s Criminal Division.

Friedrich’s testimony and statements to Congressional investigators made clear that the decision to proceed with “voter fraud” charges in a series of dubious cases resulted from direction from partisan political operatives in the White House, including Rove.

McClatchy writes:

Only weeks before last year’s pivotal midterm elections, the White House urged the Justice Department to pursue voter-fraud allegations against Democrats in three battleground states, a high-ranking Justice official has told congressional investigators.

McCain: Iraqi government can’t order U.S. withdrawal

Raw Story
Excerpt
On NBC’s Meet the Press this morning John McCain told host Tim Russert that the Democrats’ plan of setting a date for withdrawal from Iraq “would lead to … an enormously challenging situation as a result.”

“But, Senator,” Russert countered, “the Iraqi parliament, a majority of the Iraqi parliament, has signed a petition asking for a date certain for withdrawal of American troops. If the Iraqi parliament wants it, a majority in the Congress want it… then why do you stand there and say, ‘No, you can’t have it’?”

McCain replied that he understands “that if the American people don’t continue to support this effort that [the US] will be forced to withdraw” but his job as a senator is to tell the American people that his assessment is that withdrawal would be “catastrophic.”

Iraq Insurgents Boast of Ambush

Washington Post
Excerpt
BAGHDAD, May 13 — The insurgent coalition that includes al-Qaeda in Iraq asserted responsibility on Sunday for the ambush south of Baghdad that left four U.S. soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter dead and three other American soldiers missing….
The suicide truck bomb that exploded in Makhmur, near the southern border of the area known as Kurdistan, killed at least 50 people and wounded at least 115, according to government and hospital officials. The blast targeted the office of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the political organization run by Massoud Barzani, at a time when Kurdish politicians and police were meeting to discuss constitutional issues surrounding the fate of territory around Kurdistan, said Col. Khurshid Abdullah of the 3rd Iraqi Army Division.

Neil Bush of Saudi Arabia

Bend (Ore.)
Excerpt
In late February, only a few days after Saudi Arabia beheaded four Sri Lankan robbers and then left their headless bodies on public display in the capital of Riyadh, Neil Bush, for the fourth time in the past six years, showed up for the country’s Jeddah Economic Forum. The Guardian reported that Human Rights Watch “said the four men had no lawyers during their trial and sentencing, and were denied other basic legal rights.” In an interview with Arab News, the Saudi English language paper, Bush described the country as “a kind of tribal democracy.”

Neil Mallon Bush, the son of President George H. W. Bush and the brother of President George W. Bush, attended the forum to renew old family friendships and to drum up a little business for his educational software company. “The Jeddah Economic Forum has been very productive,” Bush told Arab News. “I have been to this conference four times since 2002. I have seen it develop from the very beginning. There was less participation in the past, now there is more international participation.”

HLs Take
This is the guy who was behind the Silverado Savings and Loan Scandal in the ’80s that may have cost his father a second term. As usual with the Bush family Millions of Dollars were stolen. Of course nowadays they steal Billions at a time.) They ended up paying about 10% of it back in fines. Niel was Poppy’s hand picked successor until he screwed up and got caught. After Clinton was elected Poppy spent the next 8 years greasing the rails for his other son. The Murder Monkey to steal the election so the theft of Billions could continue. They all belong in The Federal Penitentiary.

Ground Zero Illnesses Clouding Giuliani’s Legacy

NY Times
Excerpt
At the same time, the administration warned companies working on the pile that they would face penalties or be fired if work slowed. And according to public hearing transcripts and unpublished administration records, officials also on some occasions gave flawed public representations of the nature of the health threat, even as they privately worried about exposure to lawsuits by sickened workers….
City officials and a range of medical experts are now convinced that the dust and toxic materials in the air around the site were a menace. More than 2,000 New York City firefighters have been treated for serious respiratory problems. Seventy percent of nearly 10,000 recovery workers screened at Mount Sinai Medical Center have trouble breathing. City officials estimate that health care costs related to the air at ground zero have already run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and no one knows whether other illnesses, like cancers, will emerge…
Mr. Giuliani has said very little publicly about how his leadership might have influenced the behavior of the men and women who worked at ground zero. Mr. Giuliani, whose image as a 9/11 hero has been a focus of his run for president, declined to be interviewed for this article. His representatives did not respond to specific questions about the pace of the cleanup, the hazards at the site and Mr. Giuliani’s reticence about the workers’ illnesses.

Thanks to The Califrornia Endownment.

Please join us for a thought-provoking evening with journalist Jonathan Cohn, author of the new book Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis—And the People Who Pay the Price. A senior editor at The New Republic, as well as a senior fellow at the Demos network and a former media fellow with the Kaiser Family Foundation, Cohn traveled across the United States to investigate why this crisis is happening and to witness, first-hand, its impact on ordinary Americans. His book weaves powerful real-life stories with clear-eyed reporting from Washington, D.C., and inside the medical industry, chronicling the evolution and ultimate failure of our health system.

Cohn will present a roadmap for rethinking the way our government administers health insurance, shedding new light on a vital debate underway here in California and nationally in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Discussion moderator: Michelle Levander, director of The California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC

Event Details

Tuesday, May 15, 2007, 5:30 p.m.

The California Endowment’s Center for Healthy Communities
Yosemite Hall
1000 North Alameda St.
Los Angeles, CA 90012
FREE PARKING

Admission is free but reservations are strongly encouraged.