Fitz?

FDL seem a little spooky tonight. The old site is 3 posts behind this one, and nobody here has commented in the last half hour. Is anybody out there?

I think everyone is over on blogspot – gotta love moving servers!

That’s funny, Siun, because the reason I came over here is that it was so slow over there. Maybe a lot of people have given up trying to cope with the move.

hey, you guys, how come you dropped skippy off the blogroll on the new site?

i realize you dropped everyone (except c&l) off the blogroll, but to be brutally honest, i don’t care about everyone, i only care about skippy.

i remember getting an email from a young jane hamsher about 2 years ago, asking what happened to the link to firedoglake on skippy’s blogroll.

i am only returning the favor.

Earl Blumenauer(D) Oregon 3rd Congressional District, is my representative in the House of Representatives. I did not see this interview on Fox but it sounds like he did his constituents proud.

“Friday night (3/17/06), Hannity & Colmes hosted Democratic Congressman Earl Blumenauer of Oregon who has introduced new legislation to order US troops from Iraq, starting with the National Guard soldiers. Rather than debate the issues, Sean Hannity did his best to berate and tyrannize Rep. Blumenauer. But the Congressman refused to capitulate and his calm, pithy responses to Hannity’s cheap theatrics makes Blumenauer our next top dog.”

“Blumenauer said his constituents agree that the US troops have done what we have asked them to do and that it’s time to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis. He added that it’s “1,049 days after President Bush famously announced, ‘Mission Accomplished.’ It’s time for us to bring those troops home now, starting with the National Guard.†He also told Colmes that the majority of Iraqis believe that the violence will diminish once US troops leave. “After hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands of lives lost, it’s time for us to re-focus our efforts, to start bringing those troops home and having the Iraqis take responsibility for their own defense and for their own governance.â€

http://www.newshounds.us/2006/…..y.php#more

Somebody needs to take on Senator Gordon Smith (R)in 2008. Maybe Blumenauer should give it some thought.

skippy the blog roll will move over, don’t worry, I would never drop you off.

You have a Republican Party that shows their history of poor economic policies that shows their concern for wealthy people, their friends and families and noone else.

This Republican Party also has DEMONSTRATED that it could not Defend America on Sept 11, 2001

yet these losers manage to fool the public into voting for them in 2002, for Bush and them in 2004.

However it does not last forever. Only 33 percent approve of George W Bush’s job right now.

In order to win in the fall we need to empahsize that the Republican Party failed to defend America on Sept 11, 2001 and that the Dubai port deal wasn’t the first secret arrangement to get Bush’s friends some business.

It happened in 2001 when Bush attempted to get Unocal some business in the form of a pipeline project through Afghanistan. Yes Bush dealt with terrorists from Jan 2001 until July 2001 and when the Taliban refused to come to a deal, Bush threatened them with invasion in July 2001.

Bush had chosen profits over people and it literally blew up in 3,000 people’s faces in 2001 yet the people did not know an did not blame Bush for the 9-11 attacks even though he provoked them and failed to defend against them.

People will not blame anything on the Republican Party or George W Bush as long as they help their financial interests.

Yes not only do Bush and the Republican put profit before people but people who vote for Bush also do that. The only way you will stop the Bush crime family comes for a big revolt against the profits against the friends of the Republican Party in the form of boycotts against their contributors.

This is only the start of the kind of things we will see inthe future from the vets.Think “First Blood” and you will see it HERE.

thanks, jane. you da bomb.

now, about my script…

The new site’s RSS feeds appear not to be updating. I use Bloglines, and the last update is from Friday (The Political Tin Ear of Evan Bayh).

Anti-war Protests on Yahoo! News Photos http://news.yahoo.com/photo/06…..f38d27ca9b
Three years on: the tragedy of the Iraq invasion is that there won’t be another Published 03/20/2006 London, UK “FOR SOME REASON, and for a number of years, I have been on the e-mail list for the Stop the War coalition. This is bizarre, though in fairness to them each newsletter explains how I could “unsubscribe†should I wish to. Having never subscribed in the first place, and finding these manic missives entertaining in a macabre sort of way, I have never removed myself from their records. After this column, they might do it for me. Anyway, the latest call to (non) arms arrived last Thursday. It asked: “Where will you be on March 18?†The supermarket would be the truthful answer but not the one that was being solicited. Where they would have prefered me to be was Parliament Square for the demonstration marking the third anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. The e-mail contained rhetoric that has become familiar, though fatuous. It railed against “lies about weapons of mass destructionâ€, an “illegal warâ€, “Abu Ghraib†and the “expropriation of Iraqi resourcesâ€. All the words so often employed about Iraq were there, except, of course, “Saddam†and “Husseinâ€. In any case, the entire episode started in March 2003 was condemned as an “occupation†that has “brought nothing to the Iraqi people except ever increasing death and destructionâ€. I suppose it depends on how you define “nothingâ€. If two elections, one constitutional referendum, a free press, an independent judiciary, greater religious liberty, the lifting of economic sanctions, reintegration into the region and the wider international community count for “nothingâ€, then nothing is a reasonable assessment. As many leaders of the anti-war movement have nothing but contempt ———————————————————————————————- for “bourgeois democracy†and hate capitalism and its manifestations, then, for —————————————————————————————————————- them, “nothing†is entirely accurate. ———————————————– The rest of us, however, might reach a more rounded conclusion. When told that Iraq has been a “tragedyâ€, we might agree but not in the way that those who use that term take it. The tragedy is not that troops went into that land in 2003 but that they did not arrive earlier or in larger numbers. For the first tragedy of Iraq is that this is the third and not the seventh anniversary of its liberation. I am not one of those who thinks that it would have been possible for the US to have pressed on to Baghdad in 1991 after expelling Saddam’s conscripts from Kuwait. The older President Bush opted to take the “UN route†and was thus shackled by its limited mandate. What should have happened, though, was a showdown in March 1999, four months after the Iraqi dictator expelled UN weapons inspectors. This was the umpteenth violation of the terms under which he had earlier sued for peace and more than enough justification to remove him from power, irrespective of whether France, Germany or Russia had scant enthusiasm for the venture. If America and Britain had acted then, life would have been considerably easier. Delay after that point meant that it could always be asked “why now?†by opponents of intervention. As it was, Bill Clinton, handcuffed by the manner in which he avoided the conflict in Vietnam and shamed by the exposure of his exploits with Monica Lewinsky, could no more launch an assault on Iraq than he might claim membership of the American Celibacy Association. The second tragedy lies in the miscalculations made about weapons of mass destruction. It should be acknowledged that these mistakes did not rest with the CIA or MI6 alone; every leading intelligence agency believed that Saddam had or was close to securing a biological, chemical or nuclear capacity and that he was inclined to deploy it. We now know that the senior ranks of Iraq’s armed forces assumed that there was an advanced WMD programme and were astonished to discover on the eve of war that none was available. The tragedy of what went wrong in Iraq, therefore, is that the failure to locate WMD has made action against Iran or North Korea far harder to advance to Western public opinion. This would have been true even if Iraq, post invasion, was now a land of peace and plenty. The final tragedy is that while many will prosper within Iraq over the next three years, the price of inept peacetime policies between 2003 and 2005 is that there will be no more Iraqs in the foreseeable future. To that extent, the Stop the War coalition, assisted, ironically, by the Pentagon, will be satisfied. And what does this mean in practice? It means no more sadistic totalitarian dictators removed from office. It means no more free and fair elections for those who have never had them. It means no more openings for civic and religious liberty. It means no more chances of a cultural reawakening. Democracy might well progress in parts of the Middle East but, alas, mostly in the states that were most benign to begin with. There is little reason to suppose that the ruling elites in Damascus, Tehran or Tripoli have the cause for fear that they must have briefly felt three years ago. Nor have the people under their yoke any reason for optimism that they might yet escape servitude. It has become fashionable in certain American neo-conservative circles to declare that Iraq has been “lost†and to wash their hands of the enterprise. Personally, I have never been part of that fraternity. It seems to me that their logic is dubious. Iraq has not been “lostâ€, there is still a reasonable chance that by the actual seventh anniversary of the incursion the vast majority of people there will be more content than at any time in their history. It is the enslaved Middle East beyond Iraq that has been “lost†and thus remains an intense threat to our security. “What were you doing on March 18?†Lamenting what could and should but did not occur. “

I wonder whether anyone will ask Bush how he defines ‘victory.’

Here’s what Condoleezza Rice, on November 28, 2003, said we’d achieve in Iraq:

we will…change the nature of Iraq to a place that is peaceful and democratic and prosperous in the heart of the Middle East[.]

I’d love to see a reporter ask Bush if he still thinks we can manage that anytime soon. Because if it’s going to take a “generational commitment” to achieve that end, we’d have been much better off just waiting for Saddam to die of old age.

My heart goes out to all the innocent Iraqi men, women and children who have no lights, no heat, no clean water and live in fear every day of their lives. Real fear, not the phony fear repugs use to keep their base in line.