The Hollywood Liberal

So, a new report that just came out is saying that Al Qaeda, is stronger now then it ever was. Whaat?, So we have been fighting them for the last 6 years and they are stronger now. What does that say about us, and the people in charge of fighting Al Qaeda. Failure
Bush has once again failed us, failed the military, and made the whole nation look like fools. Now this is all perfect news to Bush who wants Al Qaeda to be stronger then ever so we have to fight them forever. The longer the wars last the richer he gets. it’s as simple as that. So we go into Afghanistan to fight AQ and Bin Laden. We let Bin Laden get away at Tora Bora, the reason has still never been explained especially since Bush got up on that pile of rubble and promised to bring him in dead or alive. That was one of many Bush lies that the Republicans give him a pass on.

Intelligence Puts Rationale For War on Shakier Ground

Washington Post
Excerpt

The White House faced fresh political peril yesterday in the form of a new intelligence assessment that raised sharp questions about the success of its counterterrorism strategy and judgment in making Iraq the focus of that effort.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush has been able to deflect criticism of his counterterrorism policy by repeatedly noting the absence of any new domestic attacks and by citing the continuing threat that terrorists in Iraq pose to U.S. interests.

So Bush decides that the country that is harboring Al Qaeda, is not as important as a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. Iraq is much more important in the war on terror, not only that, but “Saddam tried to take out my dad,” and lets not forget about the oil. So here we are 6 years later, AQ is flourishing in Pakistan (or are they? the whole story sounds to me like a BS attempt to try to divert from the fact that even Republicans are now defecting from Bush and his endless war policy.) and there are now AQ in Iraq when there wasn’t before. Somewhere the Failure Monkey peels a bananna and lets out a hearty laugh.

Confronted with a political brush fire, the president and his aides retreated to familiar ground, highlighting the parts of the report that they saw as supportive of their policies, particularly the need to confront Islamic radicals on the ground in Iraq.

In talking with reporters in the Oval Office yesterday, Bush concentrated on a single paragraph in the assessment that placed the enemy in Iraq in a larger context of international terrorism. The estimate said bin Laden’s organization will “probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qa’ida in Iraq, its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the Homeland.”

A candlelight vigil, and rally was held outside Congress at midnight. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Carl Levin, and other Democratic congressmen and women showed up and make speeches. Here are some excerpts.

Joe Lieberman spouting off in favor of endless war as usual.

Dianne Feinstein of California asks if anyone truly believes the war has improved America’s image to the world, if so she says they must be “smoking something”

When the Bush torture policy in Guantanamo was getting lots of negative press, and making us look no better then Russia under Stalin. Cheney and Rummy and the boys came up with a new plan. “Lets just kidnap the bad guys and ship them off to some foreign country, without telling anyone, not even his family. Then we can torture the F**k out of him to our hearts content.”
This secret program could have gone on for years without anyone knowing about it, except members of the CIA, who are not known as being coddler’s were so embarrassed by what Bush was doing that they blew the whistle on the whole thing, and it was finally reported by the Washington Post, throwing the whole thing open for public scrutiny. Of course the Bush administration likes to keep lots of things secret because once the people find out, they show their outrage of the evil. You know it’s bad when the CIA won’t even let you get away with it.

CIA dissenters helped expose renditions, says inquiry chief

Guardian UK
Excerpt

“Many leading figures in the CIA did not accept these methods at all,” Dick Marty (of the council of Europe) told a committee meeting yesterday. He said senior agency officials had agreed to help his investigation in return for anonymity. “People in the CIA felt these things were not consonant with the sort of intelligence work they normally do,” he said.
In his report late last month, Mr Marty presented evidence of a secret programme to transfer terror suspects to a network of detention centres where they could be interrogated without the protection of US or international law. Some of these prisons were on European soil, specifically in Poland and Romania, and were used from 2002 to 2005.

The rendition programme was exposed by the Washington Post in November 2005. The US president, George Bush, confirmed last year that the CIA had conducted such clandestine transfers of detainees, who were interrogated using what he described as “alternative procedures”.

Another Bush political appointee who had absolutely no training for the very important job he was given has resigned amid the type of colossal failure that the monkey particularly loves. Like Michael (Heckuva job Brownie) Brown, Jim Nicholson who was in charge of the Veterans Affairs committee, had no idea what he was doing. Previously Nicholson was the Ambassador to the Vatican, and chairman of the Republican National Committee, so what better way to reward him then giving him a job making sure that our veterans coming home from Iraq are being taken care of. Since Bush does not want to take care of the guys lucky enough to make it home alive from his meat grinder it makes perfect sense. Of course the administration Praised
him for a job so well done, but actually this guy was a perfect Bush screw up. Think Progress gives us a little list of his dubious achievements.

VA Secretary Resigns After Record Of Neglecting Veterans

Think Progress
Excerpt

In February 2005, Nicholson kicked off his tenure by calling praising a VA budget proposal that cut “health care staffing, reduced funding for nursing home care and [included] staffing cuts for the Board of Veterans Appeals.” He said it demonstrated of the Bush administration’s “ongoing commitment to provide the very best health care and benefits to those veterans who count on VA the most.” [LINK]

– In May of 2006, Nicholson waited two weeks to notify the Justice Department and FBI of the “largest loss of personal data in U.S. government history.” He then waited another full week before notifying the 26.5 million effected veterans of the theft. [LINK]

– In April of 2006, Nicholson rejected four separate bills “pending before Congress to reduce the 600,000-case backlog of veterans’ benefits claims.” [LINK]

– In May of 2007, the AP revealed that Nicholson awarded “$3.8 million in bonuses to top executives in fiscal 2006? — many as much as $33,000 — despite the department suffering from a $1.3 billion shortfall. [LINK, LINK]

A Louisiana lawyer who was charged by the IRS for refusing to file tax returns for the last several years has been acquitted. The federal tax law has been questioned for years about it’s legality in actually making people have to pay taxes. Of course the IRS will use its considerable resources to make sure that no one ever tries to stop paying them. They are a criminal enterprise supported by the American Government, who will harrass you literally to death if you ever question why you pay 1/3 of your income to them. So how long until an appeals court overturns this decision?

Local attorney acquitted on federal income tax charges

Shreveport Times
Excerpt

“The court could not find a law that makes me liable or makes my revenues taxable,” Cryer said. “The Supreme Court has ruled that the government cannot impose an income tax on anything but the profits and gains. When you work for someone you give your service and labor in exchange for money, so everything you make is not profit or gain. You put something into it.”

Tommy Cryer was indicted last year on two counts of tax evasion. The indictment alleged he evaded payment of $73,000 in income tax to the Internal Revenue Service during 2000 and 2001.

Cryer created a trust listing himself as the trustee, and received payments of dividends, interest and stock income to that trust, according to the indictment. He also was accused of concealing his receipt of the sources of income from the IRS by failing to file a tax return on behalf of that trust.

“I determined that my personal earnings were not 100 percent profits, some were income,” Cryer said. “I refuse to file, I refuse to pay unless they can show me I have a lawful reason to pay.”

“What I earned was my own personal labor. I am giving something in exchange. I’m giving my property and I don’t belong to anyone else.”

Cryer says he stopped filing returns more than 10 years ago after he investigated claims that income tax was a sham. He contends the law doesn’t actually tax personal earning.

Here is an entertaining little video that shows all the lies that Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Darth Cheney used to get us into the bloody quagmire without end in Iraq, which by the way has made us no safer from Al Qaeda, then we were before 9/11. That’s what the Bush administration is now telling us. While we have been fighting them over there, AQ has been getting stronger in the places we should have been fighting them, like Pakistan, and Afghanistan. But is was Iraq that the administration had a hard on for. Watch the video see the lies exposed

In the upcoming Presidential election, Democrats will have to win states that they lost in the last couple of elections, by that I mean they have to win states that they won the last two election but were stolen from them, namely Florida, and Ohio. If the dems. can manage to win one of those states, they will need some others with high electoral vote counts such as Colorado, or Arizona.
Then their is another option: just win Texas. According to the Wall Street Journal the Republican party is even in trouble in that bastion of everything conservative, here’s the story.

Wall Street Journal: The Troubled Texas GOP

Excerpt

Don’t believe that voters would ever draw such a conclusion in Texas? In June several national polls found younger voters are turning away from the GOP. One of them, conducted by CBS News, the New York Times and MTV, found that 54% of 17- to 29-year-olds would vote for a Democratic candidate for president, while only 32% would vote Republican.

Many Republicans would like to believe that they are only experiencing a temporary downdraft caused by the unpopularity of the Iraq war and President Bush–conventional wisdom that seems to forget that Mr. Bush’s success in gubernatorial and presidential elections is a large reason why the GOP completed its domination of state politics. It was only in 2002 that the party won control of the Legislature.

Not everyone, however, is buying this assessment. Royal Masset, a political consultant and longtime political director for the Republican Party of Texas–who played a key role in organizing the grassroots support that took the GOP from marginality to an overwhelming majority–has been predicting a reversal for years.

“There’s a certain inevitability in demographics,” he told me. “We knew that if we could win 40% of the Hispanic vote,” as Mr. Bush did in 2004, “we’d control Texas until 2030.” But in 2006, the number of Texas Hispanics who voted Republican fell to between 30% and 35% (depending on the poll).

Is this the reason why Bush is so in favor of “guest worker programs” and giving illegal immigrants a chance to stay here legally. Sure he wants it so his buddies in big business have a source of cheap labor and to do away with the middle class. But maybe Bush knows something that his more strident anti-immigration republicans don’t want to think about. More from WSJ

And why not? A similar flip happened in California in the 1990s. What was once Reagan Country became a Democratic stronghold. GOP Gov. Pete Wilson’s get-tough approach to immigration was an undeniable factor.

Here is a story about how the US used Psychologists to help them come up with their torture policy. These same Psychologists were used by the US to help soldiers overcome soviet style interrogation tactics. The CIA used those same tactics and turned them around for American soldiers to use against Al Qaeda. Of course torturing victims to talk does not work, eventually they will just tell you whatever it is you want to hear just to get the torture to stop. If you treat a suspect with respect, you are much more likely to find out what you want to know. Just like if you treat a country with respect (as opposed to just killing them all) they are much less likely to want to kill us and our soldiers. Of course the Bush administration knows this but they don’t practice it because they want the war to go on forever.

Rorschach and Awe

Vanity Fair
Excerpt

Zubaydah was stabilized at the nearest hospital, and the F.B.I. continued its questioning using its typical rapport-building techniques. An agent showed him photographs of suspected al-Qaeda members until Zubaydah finally spoke up, blurting out that “Moktar,” or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had planned 9/11. He then proceeded to lay out the details of the plot. America learned the truth of how 9/11 was organized because a detainee had come to trust his captors after they treated him humanely.

Al-Qaeda operative Khalid Shaikh Mohammed shortly after his capture, 2003. Corbis.
It was an extraordinary success story. But it was one that would evaporate with the arrival of the C.I.A’s interrogation team. At the direction of an accompanying psychologist, the team planned to conduct a psychic demolition in which they’d get Zubaydah to reveal everything by severing his sense of personality and scaring him almost to death.

This is the approach President Bush appeared to have in mind when, in a lengthy public address last year, he cited the “tough” but successful interrogation of Zubaydah to defend the C.I.A.’s secret prisons,