side note: it will just get worse for these Repubs.

By Steven T. Dennis
Roll Call

Cracks are starting to show in the near-monolithic Republican support for the Iraq War, with President Bush’s critics hoping that the trickle of opposition will swell into a flood later this year.

Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.), a moderate appropriator who had been agonizing about her vote on the Iraq War supplemental for weeks, decided last week that she could no longer toe the party line.

Emerson has been increasingly unhappy with the conduct of the war, but at the same time didn’t want to support a bill she considered to be a partisan political document. So last Wednesday night, she voted “present.”

“I cannot abide the way this war is being conducted, but neither can I lend my support to a measure that politicizes the men and women in uniform so bravely serving our country,” Emerson said in a statement.

After posting the orange vote on the board, she sat next to Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (Md.), one of two Republicans to vote for the measure, for about 10 minutes. Gilchrest said the two had been talking for weeks about the war, along with a small but growing circle of disconcerted Republicans. (more…)

side note: Pete Wentz, the bass player for FOB gives us his tips on putting on eye liner. This is for my boy Tommy, who i think should start wearing makeup. Tom, take down a few pointers!

By Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch
alternet.org

Nobody really knows how much crude oil is being stolen by corrupt Iraqi and U.S. officials because, four years after the invasion, the oil meters haven’t been fixed.

The line of ships at the Al Basra Oil Terminal (ABOT) stretches south to the horizon, patiently waiting in the searing heat of the Northern Arabian Gulf as four giant supertankers load up. Close by, two more tankers fill up at the smaller Khawr Al Amaya Oil Terminal (KAAOT). Guarding both terminals are dozens of heavily-armed U.S. Navy troops and Iraqi Marines who live on the platforms.

These two offshore terminals, a maze of pipes and precarious metal walkways, deliver some 1.6 million barrels of crude oil, at least 85 percent of Iraq’s output, to buyers from all over the world. If the southern oil fields are the heart of Iraq’s economy, its main arteries are three 40-plus inch pipelines that stretch some 52 miles from Iraq’s wells to the ports.

Heavily armed soldiers spend their days at the oil terminals scanning the horizon looking for suicide bombers and stray fishing dhows (boats). Meanwhile, right under their noses, smugglers are suspected to be diverting an estimated billions of dollars worth of crude onto tankers because the oil metering system that is supposed monitor how much crude flows into and out of ABOT and KAAOT — has not worked since the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. (more…)

Rahm Emanuel
http://www.tompaine.com

Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., is the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. These remarks were prepared for delivery Wednesday at a forum hosted by The Brookings Institution.

I don’t think politics is a dirty word. (And, those of you who know me know that I am very knowledgeable when it comes to dirty words.) Politics is a vital and essential element of our political system—the vehicle by which we advance our governing principles and policies.

Believe me, I’m not naïve. President Clinton made me a top aide in the White House not because of my good looks or charm—and not because I was a top policy expert. No, I got to the White House the same way he did: through politics. I am not one who believes you can ever fully divorce politics from policy in a democracy. It would be like trying to do physics without math. Yet I’ve also always recognized that there is a balance; that we should never allow the basic functions and solemn responsibilities of government to be subjugated to or take a backseat to politics or party interests.

President Bush came to the White House with an entirely different understanding.

Not since the days of Watergate, when our judicial system and intelligence community were deployed by the White House in the service of partisan politics, have we seen such abuses. And in many ways, what we have seen from this administration is far more extensive than that scandal. (more…)

ROB TAYLOR
http://www.theglobeandmail.com
Reuters

Australia, already the world’s biggest polluter per capita and a Kyoto climate pact holdout, will exceed its greenhouse gas targets within three years, an independent study said on Friday.

Australia’s conservative government along with the United States refuses to sign the Kyoto Protocol, but insists the country is on track anyway to meet its target of 108 per cent of 1990-level greenhouse emissions by 2012.

But Australia’s Climate Institute said greenhouse emissions have risen by 22.5 million tonnes over the past three years, akin to putting five million extra cars on the country’s roads. (more…)

side note: Very powerful stuff people.
By Former CIA Officers, AlterNet

Former CIA officers write to Tenet: “You were a willing participant in a poorly considered policy to start an unnecessary war and you share culpability with Dick Cheney and George Bush for the debacle in Iraq.”

To Mr. George Tenet –

Dear Mr. Tenet:

We write to you on the occasion of the release of your book, At the Center of the Storm. You are on the record complaining about the “damage to your reputation.” In our view the damage to your reputation is inconsequential compared to the harm your actions have caused for the U.S. soldiers engaged in combat in Iraq and the national security of the United States. We believe you have a moral obligation to return the Medal of Freedom you received from President George Bush. We also call for you to dedicate a significant percentage of the royalties from your book to the U.S. soldiers and their families who have been killed and wounded in Iraq.

We agree with you that Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials took the United States to war for flimsy reasons. We agree that the war of choice in Iraq was ill-advised and wrong headed. But your lament that you are a victim in a process you helped direct is self-serving, misleading and, as head of the intelligence community, an admission of failed leadership. You were not a victim. You were a willing participant in a poorly considered policy to start an unnecessary war and you share culpability with Dick Cheney and George Bush for the debacle in Iraq. (more…)

Arianna Huffington
Huffingtonpost.com

Does this sound familiar? A senior Bush administration official plays a key role in selling the Iraq war debacle to the American public, resigns a few years later, and then tries to distance himself from Bush and the war by writing a book or talking to Bob Woodward, portraying himself as a poor, hapless victim who knew the truth at the time and really, really wanted to tell it, but, somehow, just had no choice but to go along.
What else could he do?

Each story shares the same fatal flaw. It requires that the remedy that was readily available — resignation — did not exist.

The latest in this tawdry lineup is George Tenet. (more…)

By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer
yahoo.com

The backlash has built up even before the official release of former CIA Director George Tenet’s memoir, with criticism about his version of the run-up to the Iraq war, interrogation techniques and other events.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Sunday disputed Tenet’s claim that the Bush administration, before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, never had a serious debate about whether Iraq posed an imminent threat or whether to tighten existing sanctions.

“The president started a discussion practically on the day that he took power about how to enhance sanctions against Iraq,” she said. “You may remember that in his first press conference, he said the sanctions had become Swiss cheese.”

Rice, who was Bush’s national security adviser in his first term, said the administration reviewed the sanctions, went to the United Nations to strengthen them and tried to tighten the no-fly zone in northern Iraq to better police
Saddam Hussein’s forces.

She also said the question about the imminence of the threat was not “if somebody is going to strike tomorrow.” (more…)

side note: i guess the surge is working……………… a surge in American Dead!
KIM GAMEL | AP
http://www.huffingtonpost.com

Five U.S. military personnel were killed over the weekend in Iraq, including three by a roadside bomb in Baghdad, the military said Monday, pushing the American death toll past 100 in the deadliest month so far this year.

Four Army soldiers died in eastern Baghdad, a predominantly Shiite Muslim area where U.S. and Iraqi forces have stepped up operations in the security crackdown that began Feb. 14. A Marine was killed in Anbar province, a Sunni Arab insurgent stronghold west of the capital.

An al-Qaida-linked group, meanwhile, vowed to pursue a “long-term war of attrition” in Anbar against U.S. forces and an alliance of Sunni tribal leaders who have turned against the terror network.

In violence Monday, a suicide car bomber apparently targeting an Interior Ministry convoy struck an Iraqi checkpoint near a busy square in the predominantly Sunni Arab area of Harthiyah in western Baghdad, killing four people and wounding 10, police said. (more…)

side note: do you need more proof that our political system is broken due to the levels of cash that are involved. At the same time, it is the system that we unfortunately have to work with, so it is positive to see people who backed Bush now coming around and backing Dems.

By JOSH GERSTEIN
Staff Reporter of the Sun
http://www.nysun.com

As senators Clinton and Obama crisscross the country seeking the Democratic presidential nomination and sharply criticizing President Bush, they have been collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars from donors who funded one or both of Mr. Bush’s campaigns for the White House.

In the first quarter of this year, more than 150 former Bush donors pitched in for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, while a similar number anted up for Mr. Obama, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data performed for The New York Sun by the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics.

The motives of those who lend financial support to candidates with divergent views are difficult to assess. For some donors, personal ties to politicians or their top fund-raisers transcend partisan politics. Executives at businesses susceptible to government regulation regularly straddle the field, even supporting multiple candidates in the same race. Some contributors find that their politics change over time or that the politicians they formerly supported failed to follow through on their promises. (more…)

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer

An active-duty Army officer is publishing a blistering attack on U.S. generals, saying they have botched the war in Iraq and misled Congress about the situation there.

“America’s generals have repeated the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq,” charges Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, an Iraq veteran who is deputy commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. “The intellectual and moral failures . . . constitute a crisis in American generals.”

Yingling’s comments are especially striking because his unit’s performance in securing the northwestern Iraqi city of Tall Afar was cited by President Bush in a March 2006 speech and provided the model for the new security plan underway in Baghdad. (more…)

Yesterday, the Atlanta police provided even more horrifying evidence that the government’s war on drugs continues to be a disastrous failure.

The case involves one of the latest casualties of war: 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston of Atlanta, whose November 21 death was the result of a botched “no knock” drug raid on her home.

A search warrant stating crack cocaine was being sold in her apartment allowed the officers to cut through the burglar bars protecting Johnston’s home and burst through her door without identifying themselves.

Johnston, who lived alone, apparently mistook the plainclothes officers for intruders and fired on them with an old revolver her niece had given Johnston for protection in her notoriously dangerous neighborhood.

She didn’t hit any of the officers. The police responded, firing 39 shots, killing Johnston and apparently wounding three of their own.

After her death and a fruitless search of her home, the officers planted marijuana to justify the raid. (more…)

By Robert Parry
Consortium News

George W. Bush admits he has no evidence that a withdrawal timetable from Iraq would be harmful. Instead, the President told interviewer Charlie Rose that this core assumption behind his veto threat of a Democratic war appropriation bill is backed by “just logic.”

“I mean, you say we start moving troops out,” Bush said in the interview on April 24. “Don’t you think an enemy is going to wait and adjust based upon an announced timetable for withdrawal?”

It is an argument that Bush has made again and again over the past few years, that with a withdrawal timetable, the “enemy” would just “wait us out.” But the answer to Bush’s rhetorical question could be, “well, so what if they do?”

If Bush is right and a withdrawal timetable quiets Iraq down for the next year or so – a kind of de facto cease-fire – that could buy time for the Iraqis to begin the difficult process of reconciliation and start removing the irritants that have enflamed the violence. (more…)

side note: Thanks Tom for sending my way!

Don’t pump gas on May 15th
…in April 1997, there was a “gas out” conducted nationwide in protest
Of gas prices. Gasoline prices dropped 30 cents a gallon overnight.

On May 15th 2007, we ask that all internet members not go to a gas station
in protest of high gas prices. Gas is now over $3.00 a gallon in a lot of places. (more…)

JEANNINE AVERSA | AP
http://www.huffingtonpost.com

Economic growth slowed to a near crawl of 1.3 percent in the first three months of 2007, the worst performance in four years. The main culprit: the housing slump.

The fresh reading on gross domestic product, released by the Commerce Department on Friday, was even weaker than the 2.5 percent growth rate logged in the final three months of last year. The new figures underscored just how much momentum the economy has been losing as it copes with the strain of the troubled housing market, which has made some businesses more cautious in their spending.

The first-quarter GDP figure was the weakest since a 1.2 percent pace registered in the opening quarter of 2003. GDP measures the value of all goods and services produced within the United States and is considered the best barometer of the country’s economic fitness.

“This was tepid activity in the first quarter. The economy was taking a breather,” said Ken Mayland, president of ClearView Economics.

The performance was even weaker than what economists expected; they had forecast a growth rate of 1.8 percent.

Still, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke (left), Bush administration officials and other economists don’t expect the economy to fall into a recession this year. Former Fed chief Alan Greenspan has put the odds at one in three, however. (more…)