Give Peace A Chance!

[SouthwestRanger]

Many of the Vietnam Vets who attended this Weekend's Ceremonies at Arlington and Washington D.C. should take comfort they had the part time Air National Guard Lt.George W. making sure the skies of Alabama and the American Southeast were free of Vietcong Fliers when they were risking life and limb over in Nam ! [img]wink.gif[/img] [img]graemlins/sure.gif[/img]

[SouthwestRanger]

Gus: I'll bet you'll be running out to buy this at Borders or B&N !




Bush misled U.S. on Iraq, former aide says in new book

Scott McClellan's 'What Happened' delivers tough criticism of president, advisers

By KEN HERMAN
Cox News Service


WASHINGTON ? The White House called former press secretary Scott McClellan "disgruntled" after he wrote a blistering review of the administration and concluded that his longtime boss misled the nation into an unnecessary war in Iraq in a book due out Monday.

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's book, 'What Happened,' comes out Monday.
"History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided ? that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder," McClellan wrote in "What Happened," due out Monday. "No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact."

"What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary," he wrote in the preface.

White House aides seemed stunned by the scathing tone of the book, and Bush press secretary Dana Perino issued a statement that was highly critical of their former colleague.

"Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House," she said. "For those of us who fully supported him, before, during and after he was press secretary, we are puzzled. It is sad - this is not the Scott we knew."

Perino said the reports on the book had been described to Bush, and that she did not expect him to comment. "He has more pressing matters than to spend time commenting on books by former staffers," she said.

The book provoked strong reactions from former staffers as well.

"For him to do this now strikes me as self-serving, disingenuous and unprofessional," Fran Townsend, former head of the White House-based counterterrorism office, told CNN.

Said former top aide Karl Rove, in an interview with Fox News Channel, "If he had these moral qualms, he should have spoken up about them. And frankly I don't remember him speaking up about these things. I don't remember a single word."

Richard Clarke, another former counterterrorism adviser who also came out with a book critical of administration policy, said he could understand McClellan's thinking, however. Clarke told CNN that he, too, was harshly criticized, saying that "I can show you the tire tracks."

The volume makes McClellan, a Texan picked by the president and paid by the people to help sell the war to the world, the first longtime Bush aide to put such harsh criticism between hard covers. It is an extraordinarily critical book that questions Bush's intellectual curiosity, his candor in leading the nation to war, his pattern of self-deception and the quality of his advisers.

"As a Texas loyalist who followed Bush to Washington with great hope and personal affection and as a proud member of his administration, I was all too ready to give him and his highly experienced foreign policy advisers the benefit of the doubt on Iraq," McClellan wrote. "Unfortunately, subsequent events have showed that our willingness to trust the judgment of Bush and his team was misplaced."

McClellan worked for Bush from 1999, when he signed on as a deputy in the governor's press office, until 2006, when he was forced out as White House press secretary.Comments
By pete

http://www.ajc.com/meetro/content/ne...book_0527.html

[gus danger]

Day 1856 since "mission accomplished" was declared by the ******* !
The U.S. death toll is now 4084
That's only 3 more, in the last 6 days!

That's a remarkable improvement, in right wing propaganda circles!
[img]mad.gif[/img]

PS Yeah, since the ******* administration is coming out strongly, against that McClellen book, I'll definately want to read it!

[SouthwestRanger]

There's already a 20 name waiting list to read it at my local library here in Cranford, NJ ! [img]rolleyes.gif[/img]

Also....

SUSAN SARANDON, who appeared in three films last year and won kudos for her TV movie "Bernard and Doris," is still not a contented soul. She says if John McCain gets elected, she will move to Italy or Canada. She adds, "It's a critical time, but I have faith in the American people






Larry Fine and Susan Sarandon...Separated At Birth ????

She told John Hiscock: "I thought the whole point of feminism is that you're not supposed to be defined by gender. I don't understand the reasoning behind that, because I wouldn't vote for Condoleezza Rice, and I hated Margaret Thatcher


http://www.nypost.com/seven/05292008/gossi...2946.htm?page=2
[img]graemlins/cry.gif[/img]

[gus danger]

[gus danger]

Day 1861 since "mission accomplished" was declared by the ******* !
The U.S. death toll is now 4086
[img]mad.gif[/img]

[SouthwestRanger]

AP tally: Obama effectively clinches nomination

By DAVID ESPO and STEPHEN OHLEMACHER, Associated Press Writers




WASHINGTON - Barack Obama effectively clinched the Democratic presidential nomination Tuesday after a grueling marathon, based on an Associated Press tally of convention delegates, becoming the first black candidate ever to lead his party into a fall campaign for the White House.


Campaigning on an insistent call for change, Obama outlasted former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in a historic race that sparked record turnout in primary after primary, yet exposed deep racial and gender divisions within the party.

The tally was based on public declarations from delegates as well as from another 15 who have confirmed their intentions to the AP. It also included 11 delegates Obama was guaranteed as long as he gained 30 percent of the vote in South Dakota and Montana later in the day. It takes 2,118 delegates to clinch the nomination.

The 46-year-old first-term senator will face John McCain in the fall campaign to become the 44th president. The Arizona senator campaigned in Memphis during the day, and had no immediate reaction to Obama's victory.

Clinton stood ready to concede that her rival had amassed the delegates needed to triumph, according to officials in her campaign. They stressed that the New York senator did not intend to suspend or end her candidacy in a speech Tuesday night in New York. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to divulge her plans.

Obama's triumph was fashioned on prodigious fundraising, meticulous organizing and his theme of change aimed at an electorate opposed to the Iraq war and worried about the economy ? all harnessed to his own innate gifts as a campaigner.

Along the way, Obama showed an ability to weather the inevitable controversies, most notably one caused by the incendiary rhetoric of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

At first, Obama said he could not break with his longtime spiritual adviser. Then, when Wright spoke out anew, Obama reversed course and denounced him strongly.

Clinton struggled with self-inflicted wounds. Most prominently, she claimed to have come under sniper fire as first lady more than a decade earlier while paying a visit to Bosnia.

Instead, videotapes showed her receiving a gift of flowers from a young girl who greeted her plane.

READ MORE AT

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080603/...pr/primary_rdp

[SouthwestRanger]

Consumers Use Rebate Checks for Bills and Gas

PETER S. GOODMAN
The New York Times
May 31, 2008



MIAMI ? The federal government is showering households with tax rebates to spur spending and invigorate a troubled economy. But many Americans are so consumed with debt and the soaring price of gasoline that they are opting to save the money or use it to pay bills, according to surveys, sales data and interviews with people from Florida to California.




Between late April and the end of last week, the Treasury handed out more than $50 billion of the $100 billion in tax rebates it plans to distribute to 132 million households. But only once in the last six weeks have chain stores registered an increase in sales, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, whose weekly sales survey is a widely watched barometer.

?The initial sense is that people are not running out to the malls to spend their checks,? said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at the PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. ?It?s not quite proving to be a hot potato that?s burning a hole in people?s pockets.?

Here in Miami, where the economy remains stuck in the orbit of plummeting real estate prices, Guillermo Gonzalez is one of those using their tax rebates

READ MORE AT....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/bu...in&oref=slogin

[SouthwestRanger]

His 1964 track 'The Times They are a-Changin' became the anthem for his generation, symbolising the era-defining social struggle against the establishment.




Now Bob Dylan - who could justifiably claim to be the architect of Barack Obama's 'change' catchphrase - has backed the Illinois senator to do for modern America what the generation before did in the 1960s.

In an exclusive interview with The Times, published today, Dylan gives a ringing endorsement to Mr Obama, the first ever black presidential candidate, claiming he is "redefining the nature of politics from the ground up".
Dylan, 67, made the comments when being interviewed in Denmark, where he stopped over in a hotel during a tour of Scandinavia.

Asked about his views on American politics, he said: "Well, you know right now America is in a state of upheaval. Poverty is demoralising. You can't expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor.

"But we've got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up...Barack Obama.

"He's redefining what a politician is, so we'll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I'm hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to."

He added: ?You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future."

Dylan's endorsement contains much symbolic significance. The legendary singer-songwriter, who has an art exhibition opening in London next week, became a focal point for young people worldwide when he released the album 'The times they are a-changin'," including the famous song of that name, in 1964.

The track, which he wrote as the social liberation of the '60s astonished politicians and parents, included lines urging people to accept and embrace what was happening around them.

Memorable lines included: "Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call. Don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall," and: "Come mothers and fathers throughout the land, and don't criticise what you can't understand. Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command. Your old road is rapidly agin'."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle4076339.ece

[SouthwestRanger]

Bush Expresses Regret For 'Rhetoric' Leading to Iraq War

By VOA News
11 June 2008




U.S. President George Bush says he regrets that the way he spoke ahead of the Iraq invasion made him appear as a "guy really anxious for war."

In an interview published Wednesday in the British daily The Times Mr. Bush said that, in retrospect, he could have used "a different tone, a different rhetoric."

The U.S. president said that such phrases as "dead or alive" and "bring them on" let people think he was "not a man of peace." [img]graemlins/bat.gif[/img]

Mr. Bush had used the language in reference to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and insurgents in Iraq.

Mr. Bush also said he was troubled about how the United States had been misunderstood ahead of the 2003 invasion, and he expressed regret about divisions caused by the war. [img]graemlins/cry_smile.gif[/img]

He also said it is very painful to put young people "in harm's way" and that he tries to meet with as many of the families of fallen soldiers as possible.

Mr. Bush told The Times he will use the last months of his final term in office to secure agreement on issues such as establishing a Palestinian state. Mr. Bush said he hopes to leave behind a series of structures that will make things easier for the next U.S. president.