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Maybe McChrystal was not following policy.
You know Foodfascist, I don't know if that is a typo or done intentionally, but capitalizing the first to letters of PResident, really highlights that the word, like the position, starts with PR. I like it, I like it a lot.
N
GD Bless the Rolling Stone for exposing that Mc Crystal Bastard.
General Petreus is a good choice; it will keep him quiet for a while too..
Pres. Obama had no real choice; he couldn't stand beside Joe Biden or his other higher-ups and say 'well, we still need the general'.. You don't undercut your own people like that.
Best of a bad situation and now we just wait for Stanley to show up on Fox News with Sarah...
Sad,
Rick
PResident is speaking
Yeah, lets premptively BOMB CANADA!!! right on Thom
;-)
N
Breaking news;
Not sure if it is just coincidence or planned; Former General McChrystal has just been named as the replacement coach of the French National Soccer Team. He is 'glad to get away from the whining, immature behavior and poor command structure'..
Rick
Containment dome completely removed on same day a General is replaced in Afghanistan... mmmm me thinks I smell a rat.
Anyone hear about the youtube video of Oil raining down in Louisiana.
Watch it if you dare:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY-tIEqzcmU
N
Thom has been advocating a Greg Mortenson approach to Afghanistan, the past few days. While I wholeheartedly agree, I have found myself wondering whether the recent Supreme Court ruling regarding 'providing material support' would endanger CAI and their works.
Damn- Portyreas- you mean Betray us? What about Wesley Clark?
Huffington post has a live feed to the Whitehouse- to begin shortly http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
ANTS- lessons in decentralization- like we ought to model our energy policy after- distributed generation.
And, don't forget that the real lesson of the fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant is that the Ant is part of a Socialist community.
Take that, right wing ideologs!
Rall has a great sense of humor!
@Zero G #7 It was Rall's sense of humor and bonding with a captor who had gone to school in the US that kept him alive. It takes real courage to go into a war zone with a pencil and paper; tools that the military is not familiar with.
BREAKING- Containment dome has been completely taken off. ROV bumped into it- or something like that. At any rate- oil is flowly freely as we speak- AP Radio News-
The first person fired was the (civilian?) press aide who invited in Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone reporter. When paired with the press suppression/embedding in the Gulf of Mexico there is a very clear message: Obama's transparency has a rose-colored filter and touchy off switch.
I agree with Keith Olbermann's contention that Obama should tell McChrystal nice try but you are not off the hook. Instead of firing the general who speaks out (like Bush did many times) he should rip off a little of that braid, put the resignation letter in a drawer and tell McChrystal I am not going to accept it yet. And send then him back to work. The present counter-insurgency policy was McChrystal's favorite and he made inappropriate public statements in the run-up to the establishment of that policy. If the policy stays then so should the general.
To be clear about my personal views: the general, our policy and our Armed Forces should never have gone into Afghanistan. As a manager, Obama's key question for the general is 'Do you still want the job?' If the comments were an attempt to quit by insubordination the general should not be in charge of a multi-billion dollar war effort. The fact that the staff was going along with the back-talk is not surprising but it is telling. I think Obama will likely fire McChrystal for poor management: the general created &/or allowed a culture of insubordination at the top level of the army in a war zone.
Ted Rall is a very brave man. Was taken hostage in Afghanistan for a while.
The "mission statement" of the Constitution is the Preamble. The mission statement of the Bush administration was "dropping bombs on brown people and stealing their stuff."
When Paul Wolfowitz claimed that the Iraq war would pay for itself, he was announcing that the USA was going to engage in plunder, and that's a war crime.
Ted Rall noted that Afghans appreciated the Soviets aid in building roads, schools, and other infrastructure, but the Soviets had to be driven out of the country because they were occupiers.
What should be our stategy in Afgahnistan?!!? Well first shouldn't we first determine our goal??!!
I haven't heard any credible reason why we remain their, well besides the oil pipeline they want to build, which isn't a credible reason anyway, just the underlying real reason.
N
Um, I know this is off topic, but I went to look at the BP live feed this morning, and I noticed that there is nothing over the leak anymore, not even the capture device that was taking a protion of the oil to tankers. Did I miss something in the news, I haven't looked at the live feed in a few days and I'm wondering how long has it been without the capture device.
As far as Mayor McCheese is concerned, yeah fire him, he screwed up and let the press know too much.
N
I am sharing with you some factual information. In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan there is a basketball team in a small school district with 200 or less students in the high school. A school district with this enrolment would participate in Class D for state tournaments. The high school never has competed well in basketball tournaments. The school district is on the east side of the U.P. I cannot recall the school district's name. About two years or so back the high school team was doing well. In fact the Detroit sport pages wrote an article on the high school with the unusual nickname of Numb Nuts. Yes, that is their nickname.
Numb Nuts reminds me of the American brain. I will say that 95 to 100 % of Americans have embedded on their brain the nickname – Numb Nuts and that is why we, as a people, cannot resolve our many complex and serious problems. We are not only an evil, vile, and wicked nation but we have also the nickname of NUMB NUTS.
Is McChrystal only a symptom of what's really wrong with the war in Afghanistan?
The short answer would be, "yes."
The longer answer would be not just the war in Aghanistan, but the larger meme that goes largely unquestioned, that the US reserves to itself the right to: change foreign regimes at will, base troops in 150+ foreign countries, commit extrajudicial murder, stockpile WMD, torture, sell weapons systems worldwide - often to competing powers involved in conflict, and all the other evidences of "American Exceptionalism." Unless and until we confront this larger issue, playing musical chairs with the military brass is much hot air about very little indeed.
Welcome to Nazi Germany, redux.
The same kinds of "restrictions" were placed on Jews in the years leading up to WWII. They too, were also considered "aliens." Gee, I guess when you can dehumanize and categorize human beings as "illegals" and "aliens" it won't be too long before we start putting them in detention camps ...oh, that's right we ARE putting them in detention camps now. Well, then I guess the next step is euthanizing them ...out of the kindness of the "Christian nation" we so love to espouse.
Perhaps, we should start arresting ourselves for being "illegals" and "aliens" since ...if we really want to hold to the letter of the law, Everyone who is here now in this country and NOT a Native American (or descendent of African slaves) is by Treaty rights (a treaty is a legally binding document, by the way) ...which makes a good deal of us illegally trespassing in someone else's country. In fact we are all trespassing technically. Afterall, we are big supporters of the Zionist State whose inhabitants returned (according to their version) to reclaim their "homeland" after a millenium, aren't we? (Oh, you say you were born here? Just like the kids of those people you deem "illegal" might be born here, right?)
So, why not join Fremont and expand on it's principles (...well, at least let's make it a little less racist), in declaring that if you aren't legally here, you can't live in this country anymore. And according to the many many Treaties that were made with our Indigenous brothers and sisters ...ALL of which we, the colonizers, UNILATERALLY and ILLEGALLY BROKE, WE ARE ALL "ILLEGAL ALIENS" and should immediately deport ourselves.
I am all packed up and ready to be deported; how 'bout you?
Oh ..what's that? Yes, it is inconvenient to apply the "law" we love so much to ourselves, but then justice is a real beaaaach when it comes to atoning for our own transgressions and holding ourselves up to the same indiotic Draconian standards and Social Darwinian marginalizations that we just LOVE imposing on "other" people who don't look or act like us.
And to think, we once called the Indigenous Peoples of this continent "savages."
That would be funny in an ironic sort of way if we had evoled from the errors of the past as a culture ...but sadly, we are the same pathetic bunch of barbarians our ancestors were ...and the people who voted for this "law" in Fremont are a fine example of it.
Of course, what would one expect from people who have worked in slaughter houses and 'meat-packing plants' for generations?! Perhaps, the town should consider going Vegetarian or better yet Veganism ...then maybe they would have a better capacity to think more clearly and discover new resources for creating a new industry for their town ...perhaps even a Green one. And they might not then pass on their racism and prejudice to the next generation. Just a thought.
Viva Che!
-OSR