Nothing but good news (again) today…
Shadow wars in Iran, Somalia, and the Phillipines?
A prediction of taxes needing to DOUBLE by 2040 (I'll be 66.) Time to start reevaluating the retirement accounts and pre-tax post-tax plans…Via David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States…
The head of the GAO also warned that if no action is taken now to control government spending, severe tax hikes could be necessary. He stated that, "balancing the budget in 2040 could require actions as large as cutting total federal spending by 60 percent or raising federal taxes to 2 times today’s level."
Proof positive that there's no global warming – snow and frost in California = Next Ice Age (ignore the 60 degree plus outisde temperature in the northeast).
Bush's refusal to admit reality, and insistance that he can create it is causing everything to be labeled unacceptable (again).
Some of the press (McClatchy, via DailyKos), albeit not the ones who bought our beloved Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, step out and speak truth to power:
Administration leaving out important details on Iraq
By MARK SEIBEL
McClatchy NewspapersWASHINGTON – President Bush and his aides, explaining their reasons for sending more American troops to Iraq, are offering an incomplete, oversimplified and possibly untrue version of events there that raises new questions about the accuracy of the administration's statements about Iraq.
[...]
That version of events helps to justify Bush's "new way forward" in Iraq, in which U.S. forces will largely target Sunni insurgents and leave it to Iraq's U.S.-backed Shiite government to – perhaps – disarm its allies in Shiite militias and death squads.
But the president's account understates by at least 15 months when Shiite death squads began targeting Sunni politicians and clerics. It also ignores the role that Iranian-backed Shiite groups had in death squad activities prior to the Samarra bombing.
[...]
Much like the administration's pre-war claims about Saddam's alleged ties to al-Qaida and purported nuclear weapons program, the claims about the bombing of the Shiite mosque in Samarra ignore inconvenient facts and highlight questionable but politically useful assumptions.
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Beginning in 2002, the administration's case for a pre-emptive war in Iraq was plagued by similar oversights, oversimplifications, misjudgments and misinformation. Unlike the administration's claims about the Samarra bombing, however, much of that information was peddled by Iraqi exiles and defectors and accepted by some eager officials and journalists.
… The administration has continued to offer inaccurate information to Congress, the American people and sometimes to itself. The Iraq Study Group, in its December report, concluded, for example, that the U.S. military was systematically under-reporting the violence in Iraq in an effort to disguise policy failings. The group recommended that the military change its reporting system.
[...]
Whether many of the administration's statements about Iraq for nearly five years have been deliberately misleading or honest but gullible mistakes hasn't been determined. The Senate Intelligence Committee has yet to complete an investigation into the issue that was begun but stalled when Republicans controlled the committee.
And last, the Bush-Cheney-Lieberman-McCain retort to criticism on the surge escalation? If you have a better plan, out with it. Seems to me that this whole mess would have been avoided if we did nothing in the Spring of 2003. Maybe in addition to finding a way out, we need to figure out how this happened and how we keep it from happening again?
Tags: al-Qaeda, bush, California, Congress, Daily News, Iraq, Iraq's U.S.-backed Shiite government, Islamic Republic of Iran, MARK SEIBEL, Philadelphia Inquirer, Rome, Rome Falls, Senate Intelligence Committee, Shiite mosque, Somalia, U.S. military, United States, Washington
