In other words, we have to wrest power from this administration.  I seriously doubt they'll give it up.  Between the ideologues, deaf and blind to everything but the echoes in their heads and the power mad, Cheney, and the pig-headed Bush, and the my-plan-will-work-eventually-Rummy it's not going to happen.  Just try to put Rove in the back seat.  Your suggestion makes good sense, but it takes people with good sense to appreciate it, and your projected audience has not one iota of good sense.

 You have a great idea Reed!  In addition we need to put the homeland security department under the command of Jimmy Carter and GHWBush, put the Labor Department under the command of Mary Matalin and her husband, put the Justice Department under the command of Janet Reno and Mits Romney, and, and..........    I'll let  you be the one to bring this all about.  You might want to seek divine powers first, just to help a little.  While you are at it, be sure to buy a winning ticket in the next $100 milion lottery for me.

Hoppy in Sacramento

And don't forget to put the FCC under Reed Hundt and Ed Whitacre! Now, that would be fun, fun, fun...

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Pardon my schadenfreude folks...I am told I get a grade of A from the a--hole dept

Muqtada Cemnts Alliance With Sunni Islamists

On February 24, 2006 - 9:48pm jexster said:

J. McCutchen " JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Radical Shiites blew up their own mosque. They did it to marginalize the Sunnis, stir up their "base" and kick us out the door. It's perfect. It's their Reichstag moment.

 Perfect?  Want perfect. Here's perfect:

The Salafi jihad  painstakingly designed the operation so that Sunnis would blame Shiites and Shiites would blame Baathist insurgents, everyone would blame the US and no one would blame Jama'at al-Tawid wa'al Jihad. 

• Curtains for  the lasest Bush Agitprop Farce for Sucess  the National Unity Government Show.
• The Shiite militias win big and tighten grip on security forces.
• Hostility toward the Occupation grows among all factions; as Sadr's withdrawal position gains important UIA allies, his stature grows among Sunnis and with it his political power. As fears of deepening civil war and the specter of chaos loom larger, Sunnis and Shiites (perhaps even Kurds) look to Muqtada to restore national unity, peace and good order - a Hail Mary shot at the buzzer 

That's perfect - a perfect anarchy.

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Reed ain't wrong.  Impeachment in place is long shot for sure but just as surely something has to be done before Bush makes a horrible situation more horribler

Highly recommended reading: "THE CASE FOR IMPEACHMENT...Why we can no longer afford George W. Bush" by Lewis H. Lapham, Harper's March 2006.

This long, well-documented feature article of March "Harper's" is a must read. It concludes as follows

"If, however, the [Senate Judiciary] committee rises to the recognition of its constitutional task--that of correcting the imbalances of power that sometimes can foul the machinery of fair and honorable government--it will take to heart the meaning of the word 'remedy'--a corrective measure, not a punishment. It isn't the business of the Congress to punish President Bush. Any competent court in the country could arraign the President on charges identical to those brought against the crooked executives at Enron and Tyco International (fraud, misuse of stockholder funds, manipulation of intelligence) and send him off to jail dressed in an orange jump suit. Nor is it the responsibility of Congress to sit in moral judgment; the sermons can be left to the Rev. Pat Robertson and the Yale Divinity School. It is the business of the Congress to prevent the President from doing more damage than he's already don to the people, interests, health, well-being, safety, good name, and reputation of the United States--to cauterize the wound and stem the flows of money, stupidity, and blood."

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

cauterize the wound and stem the flows of money, stupidity, and blood."

I read the other day that the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints  was investigating John Paul II"s first miracle

I think I found Miracle 2

 And from the sacred to the profane, Better Late Than Never Caucus..

U.S,. experts explore Iraq exit strategies

By LUCY STALLWORTHY
UPI Correspondent

In a past life, I litigated Corps of Engineers contract appeals for construction contractors.  So may be it's just me, but I never saw a plan that didn't have a milestone for exit

Sooo, as I was fond of reminding (hectoring?) clients' construction managers, "if you do not have a plan, your plan is to fail"

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Some sort of sick joke right?

Stick to media, Reed.

Your plan isn't even remotely possible, let alone feasible.

First of all, the people you suggest as replacements for the idiots in power are basically toadies and don't have any particular ability to solve the problems themselves. Not to mention that the neocons and the forces behind them aren't about to let themselves be tossed out of power that easily. Only a mass revolt by the US population at the polls which basically got rid of every major Senator and Congressman currently incumbent would stand the slightest chance of this - and that isn't even remotely possible. Most of the bozos behind the Iraq war were not elected, they were appointed by the bozos who were elected. Unless you get rid of Bush, Cheney, and the entire Cabinet, these same neocon bozos will remain at the UN, Defense Department and State Department and Department of Justice and continue their conspiracies to destroy this country.

So unless you're advocating immediate impeachment of the entire government, fergeddaboutit. 

Second, the Secretaries of Defense and State need to be removed immediately not just "put at someone's disposal" - that was a joke, right? Since when are Cabinet level officers "at someone's disposal?" Good luck getting that to happen - you might succeed with Rumsfeld, whom everybody agrees is an arrogant asshole (as the late Colonel Hackworth described him), but you'll never get rid of Rice.

Third, getting Iran, Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to negotiate a "regional peace plan" without Israel is a total waste of time. Not to mention that Iran is unlikely to cooperate while it faces an immediate threat of military attack by both the US and Israel.  And Turkey is not going to go along unless it gets guarantees that the Kurds will NOT get a federated state with access to Kirkuk's oil revenues - and the Kurds will never go along with that, so there goes your plan.

Fourth, "security zones"?  Since when is Iraq anything like Germany? How do you propose keeping people inside their little "zones"?  Iraqi troops? Don't make me laugh. US troops? So how do they leave then?  A wall like Israel's? Right, that will work...

Fifth, allocation of resources among factions? And how would that happen? Let's leave aside the fact that merely taking cash from the US is enough to make you a collaborator with the occupation in Iraq, if you allocate according to population, the Shia get the bulk of the resources - and the Sunnis and Kurds won't go along with that. There goes that plan.

The only thing you got right was in withdrawing US troops - which needs to be done YESTERDAY. Forget the pipe dream of preventing the collapse of Iraq into an anarchy occupied by terrorists - that's already happened. Get the troops OUT before they all get killed (or have to kill half the Iraqi population) in a civil war should be the US's priority right now. 

Like I said, stick to media issues, Reed. You're useless at geopolitics.

Richard Steven Hack

www.computerproblemssolvedcheap.com 

Well, I think the President should appoint a bipartisan Commission on What is to be Done About Iraq.

The fact that GWB won't accept this is what makes it brilliant.  Because if Dems win control of either house of Congress, they could refuse to approve of new funding for Iraq (or something else Bush wants money for). Which means the 2006 elections offer a chance to the American people to make Bush do something he doesn't want to do--hand off control to someone more competant. And this strategy doesn't just stop at Iraq--homeland security, Katrina reconstruction, or any other place in which competance is an issue gives the Democrats a chance to make the election a referendum on the President's past abysmal progress.  It avoids the problem of a lack of consensus on the Dem side on exactly what we should do in Iraq--because there is wide consensus that whatever the current strategy is, it's being implemented incompetently.

I appauld Mr Hundt's idea. But Bush already passed up an opportunity two years ago when there was, perhaps, a chance for a better outcome. Back when the Abu Ghraib horrors first hit the headlines, I wondered if Bush might trim his sails and alter course: fire Rummy and put Powell in charge at the Pentagon, demand Cheney's resignation and move to form some sort of coaltion government with the Democratic leadership. Riiiight. The idea of our mulish, idiot president admitting error, even if it's only to himself, has about as much chance to happening now as it did then. None.

You think the FCC under Michael Powell and it current chairman is better? Daniel A. Greenbaum

I watched it on CSPAN2 and posts a very brief summary about it. It was very interesting. They all want us out of Iraq sooner rather than later.

[Independent Institute www.independent.org/events/detail.asp?eventID=115]

I hope this helps.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Nothing could beat the hypothetical Hundt-Whitacre discussions on the existence or not of natural monopolies in the telecom industry, and the subtleties of intra and inter modal competition...

I hope Reed has his hat and boots ready for some Texan-style Lux and Veritas 

 The unfortunate fact is that the bozos behind the bozos behind the bozos who engineered the Iraq disaster, and ultimately those responsible, are those who voted for an obviously incompetent Bush.  If that don't frost you enough, recall that they then turned around and did it again.

Hoppy in Sacramento

If Saddam would take the job give it to him.

He might be the only guy that can enforce the law west (and east) of the Euphrates. It would spoil Iranian plans. Most Americans would forget the whole thing by the next Super Bowl. Given control again, Saddam might even cut some deals with Halliburton.
 

It could be sold to the Bush base Red states as 'the ragheads deserve him'. 

Why would any leftist or moderate be happy if a politcal party rode to electoral victory by attacking Bush from the paranoid anti-Arab right? I think this dust-up helps to expose the fear-mongering, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim militarist foreign policy of a future Clinton or other DLC Democrat administration. And, of course, we are repeatedly well-informed by the silences: about new Abu Ghraib revelations, about the near civil war breaking out in Iraq, and about the renewal of the Patriot Act (with the lone exception of Senator Feingold).

Great idea Reed, but I'm afraid VLaszlo has it nailed. The Bush Administrationn continues to catapult the propaganda that everything in Iraq is just fine.

I think we'll know when they're ready to admit that they don't have a clue about what to do in Iraq.

It'll be when they start blaming Liberals for the Civil War.

 -Dave Adams-

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Why doees this man still have a job?

"Theres a growing unease with the course of reconstruction, (that) in a sense, we dont really know what were doing," Kenneth Pollack, a Middle East specialist with the Brookings Institution think tank, wrote this month.

Pollack, who calls 2006 a "make-or-break year" for the Americans in Iraq, suggested they rethink their military strategy and provide security for people in central and southern Iraq rather than chase insurgents in the West.

The flatulence of failure

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Blackeyed looks from that Quran book

Bush's salvation is his worst nightmare

Violence began to recede following calls for restraint from Islamic religious leaders, including radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose own militia was blamed for many of the attacks on Sunnis.

On Saturday, al-Sadr's movement joined Sunni clerics in agreeing to prohibit killing members of the two sects and banning attacks on each other's mosques. The clerics issued a statement blaming "the occupiers," meaning the Americans and their coalition partners, for stirring up sectarian unrest.

"We demand that the occupiers leave or set a timetable for the withdrawal," the statement said.



AP

The "Firey" Cleric. That young man is going places.