19 September 2005

Iraq: Tyrrany of the Majority erupts

The last possible justification that didn't turn out to be a complete and blatant lie for Bush's invasion of Iraq was the attempt to bring freedom and democracy. Now, I have been to the middle east, and it is not a free place. Usually a result of strict Islamic doctrine and teachings, minorities, women, and foreigners are rarely respected, often subject to beatings, taunting, intimidation, rape, and pure murder. So if someone can add a bit of freedom and justice to this land, more power to them.

However, as we have seen since the fall of the Baathist regime in Iraq, the situation has deteriorated so badly that the minorities and women that actually had a degree of protection, possibly one of the best protections in the Arab world, are now subject to the whims of armed gangs and Islamists. Women now are forced to wear the head scarf (hijab) or the full face covering Burqa, have litte freedom of movement, cannot retain jobs (thus losing their livelihoods), and have been subject to rampant sexual assaults.

Christians and other minorities are now subjected to forced conversions to Islam, kidnappings, murder, etc. As a result, an ethnic cleansing is in progress. The security situation is so bad, that instead of greater freedom and democracy, the opposite has happened, with few liberties formerly taken for granted no longer possible, and the democracy so highly spoken of ushering in a strict Shiite power base. Tyrrany of the majority is a pretty scary thing when Sharia (Islamic Law) is supported by most of the electorate.

How could the Republican Guard (and its conservative war-hawks) be so utterly incompetent as to not realize that this was going to happen? Or perhaps, this is yet another lie in their bullshit list of reasons to invade that they knew was false. If so, then this war and all the deaths have been to secure oil all along, or should I say oil profits for Bush's biggest campaign contributors.

17 September 2005

Borrow and Spend: the Conservatives Motto

This White House is making such a catastrophy in so many ways, it is hard to keep up with the insanity and intensity of it all. In his latest stroke of sheer idiocy, little Bush announced that any Hurricane Katrina costs will have to be taken out of curent spending. Read my lips, no...new...taxes! Just another way of proving to daddy of how "good" a son he is. [deactivate sarcasm mode].

The result? Well, every program has already been slashed to the bone, and no further cuts are really possible without provoking mass social protest. The conservative assholes will not even consider a rational spending cut, say by withdrawing from the $4 billion a day Iraqi tarpit, or other military cuts (funny, I thought the Cold War was over, wheres our peace dividend?).

So this, just like so many other things will just be added onto our burgeoning national debt. Hey, why pay for it ourselves when our children (who do not vote by the way) can pay for it? Lets play bankrupt the future of our nation, shall we?

The national debt today was a surprising and horrific $7,964,643,188,228.55, and rising over 1.66 billion dollars a day. Check the website, and update it. Its a bit alarming, but it increases at least $200,000 a second. Anyone remember when another notorious conservative, Ronald (McDonald) Reagan pushed the debt over a trillion bucks, then tripled it by the time he was done? ah, fond memories.

As with any debt, we get the luxury of being allowed to pay interest on this current debt, in the meager sum of around $350 BILLION each and every miserable year. One of the largest blocs of spending in the government, well, beside the military. Imagine a household that paid all its bills only by using credit cards. What type of short termed, no sense of reality thinking is this? Bush and his conservatives motto: Borrow and Spend to bankrupt the future of America.

05 September 2005

Bush Refusing Internation Help

Once again, Bush is demonstrating his incompetence. Not only has the entire hurricane Katrina disaster relief effort been seriously bungled by his appointees, but his conservative administration has so far refused the help of numerous countries around the world. This story is better covered in one of the following articles:
Dailykos article
News Blog

03 September 2005

2nd Supreme Court Opening

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist died today. This demagogue of conservative ideology was not good for the country, from his staunch anti-abortion stance, to his purely politically based defeat of Al Gores popular election in 2000, etc., he was a perpetual voice of far, far right obstructionism to this experiment in American democracy.

This answers Pat Robertsons wish for another supreme court death so that the republican dominance in congress and the executive branch can install yet another predetermined conservative to the already unbalanced Supreme Court.

01 September 2005

Freedom of Speech


Despite a huge surge in governmental repression, investigation, and perhaps most disturbing, documentation of free speech in the US, it is still a place where one can speak their mind. Freedom of speech is not meant to protect acceptable things to say, its purpose is to shield all speech, including the vulgar, mean spirited, bigoted, offensive, and all other undesirable forms.

This is not true in most places outside the western world. China and the Islamic world are probably *the* places with the least freedom of speech in the world. Further evidence of this came to light today, when a famous author in Turkey was charged with insulting Turkey's national character by stating the truth about the Turkish treatment of minorities. In particular, the ruthless slaughter of the Armenian population in the 1915 genocide, something the Turkish government adamantly refuses to acknowledge, even today, 90 years later.

This forgotten genocide of a people who had lived in eastern Anatolia for 15 centuries is a sad chapter in history, and the sheer fact that the Turks got away with it led the Nazis to plot their own genocide 30 years later. But I digress. Speech, any form of it, is a freedom we take for granted, but it must be fought for, every day and every opportunity, lest it be lost.