] To become a majority party, Democrats have to build
] stronger ties of support among poor white Protestants in
] the South and border states, urban Catholics in the
] Midwestern ones, and Hispanic immigrants in the West.
] Messages perceived as hostile to religion are not going
] to reach any of those groups.
]
] In politics demography tends to drive ideas. For this
] reason alone, the turn toward religion that can be seen
] in the speeches by Kerry and Obama are more than just a
] tactical response to the Bush administration's open
] embrace of conservative religious voters. Although
] neither Kerry or Obama are from the South, they are in
] line with the direction established for the party by
] Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, politicians who had an
] instinctive feel for both faith and liberal political
] positions.
]
] The United States, for better or worse, remains a
] religious country. No party can be a majority party
] unless it acknowledges that fact.

Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Ideas / The God gap

] The suicide bombs, the roadside bombs, the ambushes,
] kidnappings, and assassinations -- all these assaults on
] Iraqis and foreigners show a nation in violent disorder.
] This continuing mayhem, which casts doubt on the
] possibility of holding elections for an Iraqi National
] Assembly in January 2005, also casts light on the
] unmistakable failures of the Bush administration's
] efforts at peacemaking and nation-building in postwar
] Iraq.
]
] Even Republican senators at a Senate Foreign Relation
] Committee hearing Wednesday scored the administration.
] "Our committee heard blindly optimistic people from the
] administration prior to the war and people outside the
] administration -- what I call the `dancing in the street
] crowd' -- that we just simply will be greeted with open
] arms," said the committee's chairman, Richard Lugar of
] Indiana. "The nonsense of all that is apparent. The lack
] of planning is apparent." Lugar's committee was
] addressing the administration's inexcusable failure thus
] far to spend more than 6 percent of the $18.4 billion
] appropriated for reconstruction in Iraq. Because of the
] same lack of planning that Lugar lamented, the
] administration is now asking to shift more than $3
] billion from those reconstruction funds to pay for the
] training of badly needed Iraqi security forces.
]
] This need, Lugar noted, was known to the administration
] last July. Yet no request to transfer funds has been
] made until now.

Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Opinion / Editorials / Ugly truths about Iraq

] LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's foreign secretary and senior
] officials warned Prime Minister Tony Blair a year before
] invading Iraq that chaos could follow the toppling of
] Saddam Hussein, a newspaper said Saturday.
]
] The Daily Telegraph said that Foreign Secretary Jack
] Straw sent a letter marked "secret and personal" to Blair
] in March 2002 warning that no one had prepared for what
] might happen afterwards.

Lately, I find many Bush supporters arguing that critics of the situation in Iraq are simply making use of 20/20 hindsight.

The reality is that many experts warned, long before the invasion, that the occupation would be far more difficult than Bush was admitting, or for which he was planning.

For example, Retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, who was the head of Central Command from 1997 to 2000, was U.S. special envoy to the Middle East for Colin Powell from November 2002 to March 2003, and is an expert on the region, opposed the war precisely because Bush wasn't willing to commit anywhere near the necessary number of occupation troops.

You may also remember that the former Army Chief of Staff, retired General Eric Shinseki, testified before the invasion that Bush's plan used far too few troops.

Blair Was Warned of Post-War Iraq Chaos

] The mood among US policy makers appears to be one of
] digging in grimly for the long haul, while handing over
] as much responsibility for Iraq to the Iraqis themselves,
] however fragile their shoulders might be.
]
] Two recent reports from US think tanks have examined the
] problems and have made recommendations. They do not make
] happy reading.
]
] The more substantial one is from the Center for Strategic
] and International Studies (CSIS).
]
] It concluded: "Two months after the United States
] transferred sovereignty to an Iraqi interim government...
] Iraq remains embroiled in an insurgency, with security
] problems overshadowing other efforts to rebuild Iraq's
] fragile society in the areas of governance and
] participation, economic opportunity, services and
] well-being."
]
] In none of these areas, it concludes, is Iraq moving
] towards what it calls "tipping points" towards
] "self-sustainability and further progress".

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Iraq: Signs of desperation

] WASHINGTON -- It was the first public allegation that
] CBS News used forged memos in its report questioning
] President Bush's National Guard service -- a highly
] technical explanation posted within hours of airtime
] citing proportional spacing and font styles.
]
] But it did not come from an expert in typography or
] typewriter history as some first thought. Instead, it was
] the work of Harry MacDougald, an Atlanta lawyer with
] strong ties to conservative Republican causes and who
] helped draft the petition urging the Arkansas Supreme
] Court to disbar President Clinton after the Monica
] Lewinsky scandal, the Los Angeles Times has found.

I'm MemeStreaming this not because I think there's anything wrong with partisan sources becoming authorities in the news, but just to point out that I think the rise of blogging contributes to it. I'm actually inclined to think it's a good thing... after all, our legal system works on the principal that more truth is revealed when you have adversarial investigators.

On the other hand, as leftwingers and rightwingers start listening to increasingly divergent news sources, I think its getting a lot harder for one side to ever convince the other of anything. They quote Fox News to me, and I quote Air America Radio back to them.

The Seattle Times: Nation & World:

] FORT DIX, N.J. -- The 635 soldiers of a battalion of the
] South Carolina National Guard scheduled to depart Sunday
] for a year or more in Iraq have spent their off-duty
] hours under a disciplinary lockdown in their barracks for
] the past two weeks.
]
] The trouble began Labor Day weekend, when 13 members of
] the 1st Battalion of the 178th Field Artillery Regiment
] went AWOL, mainly to see their families again before
] shipping out. Then there was an ugly confrontation
] between members of the battalion's Alpha and Charlie
] batteries -- the term artillery units use instead of
] "companies" -- that threatened to turn into a brawl
] involving three dozen soldiers, and required the base
] police to intervene.
]
] That prompted a barracks inspection that uncovered
] alcohol, resulting in the lockdown that kept soldiers in
] their rooms except for drills, barred even from stepping
] outside for a smoke, a restriction that continued with
] some exceptions until Sunday's scheduled deployment.

Strains Felt By Guard Unit on Eve Of War Duty (washingtonpost.com)

] The American Family Association, of Tupelo, Miss., and
] Focus on the Family, based in Colorado Springs, Colo.,
] said they urged their supporters this week to refuse to
] buy Crest toothpaste and Tide detergent, two of P&G's
] biggest selling products.
]
] P&G spokesman Doug Shelton said the organizations have
] wrongly characterized the company's support of repealing
] a Cincinnati charter amendment to mean that it is
] supporting same-sex marriage.
]
] P&G has given $10,000 in support of a Nov. 2 ballot issue
] for repeal of a 1993 city charter amendment that forbids
] Cincinnati to enact or enforce laws based on sexual
] orientation. P&G said it believes the amendment makes it
] harder to attract visitors and potential employees to
] Cincinnati and that it subjects gay people to potential
] discrimination in workplaces and housing.

Yahoo! News - Conservative Groups Call for P&G Boycott

] Police escorted Sue Niederer, of Hopewell, N.J., from a
] rally at a firehouse after she demanded to know why her
] son, Army 1st Lt. Seth Dvorin, 24, was killed in Iraq.
] Dvorin died in February while trying to disarm a bomb.
]
] As shouts of "Four More Years" subsided, Niederer,
] standing in the middle of a crowd of some 700, continued
] to shout about the killing of her son. Local police
] escorted her from the event, handcuffed her and put her
] in the back of a police van.

I think what I find really creepy about this was that the Bush supporters kept shouting "Four More Years" to drown out this poor woman. Laura Bush could have expressed her sympathy and said why the war had to be fought -- a common way to handle hecklers -- but instead she ignored the mother, and the crowd moved into a sort of mindless chant that replaces reason with loyalty to their leader.

Yahoo! News - Woman Disrupts Laura Bush Speech in N.J.

] Fears and prejudices directed against minority
] communities are too easy to evoke and exaggerate, often
] to serve the political agendas of those who promote those
] fears. I know what it is like to be at the other end of
] such scapegoating and how difficult it is to clear one's
] name after unjustified suspicions are endorsed as fact by
] the government. If someone is a spy or terrorist they
] should be prosecuted for their actions. But no one should
] ever be locked away simply because they share the same
] race, ethnicity, or religion as a spy or terrorist. If
] that principle was not learned from the internment of
] Japanese Americans, then these are very dangerous times
] for our democracy.

Do we really need to relearn the lessons of Japanese American internment?

] COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) - Soldiers from a combat
] unit at Fort Carson say they have been told to re-enlist
] for three more years or be transferred to other units
] expected to deploy to Iraq, the Rocky Mountain News
] reported Thursday.
]
] Hundreds of soldiers from the 3rd Brigade Combat Team
] were presented with that message and a re-enlistment form
] in a series of assemblies last week, two soldiers who
] spoke on condition of anonymity told the newspaper.
]
] "They said if you refuse to re-enlist with the 3rd
] Brigade, we'll send you down to the 3rd Armored Cavalry
] Regiment, which is going to Iraq for a year, and you can
] stay with them, or we'll send you to Korea, or to Fort
] Riley (in Kansas) where they're going to Iraq," said one
] of the soldiers, a sergeant.
]
] The second soldier, an enlisted man, echoed that view:
] "They told us if we don't re-enlist, then we'd have to be
] reassigned. And where we're most needed is in units that
] are going back to Iraq in the next couple of months. So
] if you think you're getting out, you're not."
]
] The sergeant told the News the threat has outraged
] soldiers who are close to fulfilling their service
] obligation.

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