On the last night of August, the president used an Oval Office speech to boost a policy of perpetual war.
Hours later, the New York Times front page offered a credulous gloss for the end of “the seven-year American combat mission in Iraq.” The first sentence of the coverage described the speech as saying “that it is now time to turn to pressing problems at home.” The story went on to assert that Obama “used the moment to emphasize that he sees his primary job as addressing the weak economy and other domestic issues — and to make clear that he intends to begin disengaging from the war in Afghanistan next summer.”
But the speech gave no real indication of a shift in priorities from making war to creating jobs. And the oratory “made clear” only the repetition of vague vows to “begin” disengaging from the Afghanistan war next summer. In fact, top administration officials have been signaling that only token military withdrawals are apt to occur in mid-2011, and Obama said nothing to the contrary.
While now trumpeting the nobility of an Iraq war effort that he’d initially disparaged as “dumb,” Barack Obama is polishing a halo over the Afghanistan war, which he touts as very smart. In the process, the Oval Office speech declared that every U.S. war — no matter how mendacious or horrific — is worthy of veneration.
[Note from Editor: With the caveat that people vote BOTH on facts and emotions, this is a fairly good analysis on the topic]
5 Ways the Tea Party Agenda
Screws Tea Party Supporters
By Adele M. Stan
AlterNet,September 4, 2010
If people could be counted on to vote in their own best interests, there would be no Tea Party movement, for if the economic agenda embraced by Tea Partiers — a vastly pro-corporation, government-killing plan — Tea Partiers would find themselves among the people most hurt by it.
To hear Tea Party activists tell it, they seek to save future generations from the crushing demands of big government. Yet the agenda they advocate, dictated by the big-money players behind the muscular interest groups that keep the movement growing, will likely render the Tea Partiers themselves the economically squeezed subjects of a corporate state, one in which the elderly will be left to scrounge for crumbs, small businesses will be crushed by lack of capital, and their own ground-level online organizing supplanted by the networks built by giant, corporate-funded astroturf groups.
As George Lakoff and Drew Westen remind us, people don’t vote on the facts: they vote on emotion, according to Westen, and their notion of morality, according to Lakoff. The resentment of Tea Partiers toward liberals, East Coast elites, the poor and people who don’t look like them has been effectively marshaled in service of a “free market” ideology cleverly packaged as “freedom.” Never mind that free markets are anything but free for ordinary people. The packaging strikes the necessary emotional and moral chords: Free markets = freedom = liberty = endowed by the Creator, as written in the Declaration of Independence by the founders. It’s the perfect exploitation of the worldview of conservative middle-class white people — all in the service of enriching the super-rich at the expense of their unwitting, patriotic ground troops.
Plan to Slash Social Security, Medicare, Veterans Benefits after Election
by Ryan Grim
ryan@huffingtonpost.com
A major veterans organization called on President Obama to remove Alan Simpson from the deficit commission for questioning why veterans are not “helping us to save the country” by foregoing health care benefits promised in return for their military service.
On Tuesday, Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming and currently the co-chair of a deficit commission looking into spending cuts, decried “the irony that the veterans who saved this country are now, in a way, not helping us to save the country in this fiscal mess.”
Simpson wants to cut the national debt by slashing benefits for veterans. VoteVets.org, which represents 50,000 veterans and family members, has had enough. The group’s chairman, Jon Soltz, said that veterans had been concerned by comments Simpson made disparaging Social Security, calling it “a milk cow with 310 million tits!” and suggesting that military pay be frozen.
The “final straw,” writes Soltz, was Simpson calling for veterans’ benefits to be cut.
JOHANNESBURG — Striking South African public sector unions were locked in talks Wednesday over a fresh wage offer to urgently end a 15-day-walkout, though some had already rejected it, officials said.
Unions were to report back to members on the improved offer put on the table after President Jacob Zuma ordered his ministers to negotiate a solution to the stoppage that has paralysed schools and hospitals.
“I know for a fact that some of the unions have rejected the offer, that they will not sign at all,” said Chris Klopper, chairman of the Independent Labour Caucus, one of the labour umbrellas representing 1.3 million workers.
The government and unions were to meet again later Wednesday to discuss a way forward, but one of the biggest striking unions said it has refused the latest proposal.
“We have rejected the offer,” said Sizwe Pamla, spokesman for the National Education Health and Allied Workers Union (Nehawu), which has 244,000 members.
Obama on Iraq’s ‘Ending’:
S.African unions in talks to end 15-day walkout
The government and unions were to meet again later Wednesday to discuss a way forward, but one of the biggest striking unions said it has refused the latest proposal.
Beaver County Blue: Voice of the 17th CD of Progressive Democrats of America 