Photo

Coturnix (Bora) and Iddybud (Jude)
at Chapel Hill last week
Photo by David K. Beckwith (Anonymoses)

Sign This Letter Re "Downing Street Memo"

Sign This Letter Re: "Downing Street Memo"

On the same day President Bush said that 20 years from now, historians will look back on the Iraq war as "America's golden moment," Raw Story reports that Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) seeks to amass 100,000 signatures from U.S. citizens calling on President Bush for more answers about a 2002 meeting during which a senior British official said intelligence was "being fixed" to present a case for the Iraq war.

Please sign the letter and tell others to sign as well.

From JohnConyers.com:

"...Along with 88 of my colleagues, I wrote to the President requesting answers about this grave matter. Thus far, our search for the truth has been stonewalled and I need your help. I believe the American people deserve answers about this matter and should demand directly that the President tell the truth about the memo. To that end, I am asking you to sign on to a letter to the President requesting he answer the questions posed to him by 89 Members of Congress...

..Please pass on this important letter to your friends and colleagues, and ask them to sign as well.

Thank you for your help and support."

John Conyers, Jr.

Letter to President Bush Concerning the Downing Street Memo

Raw Story has learned that a coalition of activist groups running the gamut of social and political issues will ask Congress to file a Resolution of Inquiry, the first necessary legal step to determine whether President Bush has committed impeachable offenses in misleading the country about his decision to go to war in Iraq. It cites the Downing Street Memo and issues surrounding the planning and execution of the Iraq war. A resolution of inquiry would force relevant House committees to vote on the record as to whether to support an investigation.

NOTE: Telling us that history will judge this as our "golden moment" is quite a leap from Bush's reply to Bob Woodward when he asked the president how history would judge Bush on Iraq. Back then, Bush had replied:

‘History,’ and then he took his hands out of his pocket and kind of shrugged and extended his hands as if this is a way off. And then he said, ‘History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.’”

Reference: AfterDowningStreet.org

___

From "the farmer" at Corrente:

Is this a lie...?
"I have no knowledge of the Downing memo."

Is that a lie? That's what the host of this mornings episode of CSPAN's Washington Journal told a caller when asked to briefly explain the Downing Street memo. (Friday, May 27, 2005).

So noted informed tv-journalist host, after informing the caller that he had no knowledge of such things, then suggested the caller might try searching about on the internet to find what they were looking for.

That's our liberal media!

BBA

Memorial Day - Fair and Balanced

Memorial Day - Fair and Balanced

Fox News tells us, by it's slogan (which, ironically, they betray every day), that we should be fair and balanced.

Memorial Day is approaching.
With the world as it stands today, I wanted to find a way to be Fair and Balanced about the American Holiday's observation.

I have chosen to honor soldiers' sacrifices in the face of my bitter and realistic heartbreak over our current foreign policy.

I recently thought to myself, "If the world is watching me, what will I say, as an American who wishes to honor my nation's war dead - knowing fully well that some perfectly innocent people have died in a war which, after knowing what we now know, my nation never had to initiate?"

That's a difficult question.

Diane, a writer at Daily Kos, has written a poignant story called "One Hundred Names You Won't Hear This Memorial Day". From the photo of the first young man on her list, who resembles my own son, I cannot turn away from what is true and what is real. I am Pro-Life. I believe innocent boys and girls should never die in the name of collateral consequence, regardless of the material benefit an optional war provides for us as citizens of a nation.

Stem cell research has little to do with Memorial Day, but asking for logic that would follow a straight path has a lot to do with the point I'd like to make. On ABC News' This Week, Rev. Billy Graham's daughter, Ann Graham Lotz, recently said:

"My father has Parkinson's disease. I have a son who has cancer, a mother who has degenerative arthritis and I have a husband who has diabetes. And those are four very close family members, each one of whom has a disease that I have read, anyway, could be possibly affected by stem cell research, which is exciting to me, but embryonic stem cell research, which is still distressing to me. I would not want any one of my family members to benefit from the willful destruction of another human life."

If that is true, and unless she is a complete hypocrite (which I do not believe she is), then we can put Ann Graham Lotz in the category of "Anti-war". After all, given her logic, the many innocent deaths we have willfully caused in Iraq, which were of a secondary (collateral) nature to our intent to win in an optional war which benefits our nation would surely not be morally acceptable.

Yet, listen to what Anne Graham Lotz said when asked by Jane Clayson on the NBC Today Show about 9/11:

Clayson asked, "I've heard people say, those who are religious, those who are not, if God is good, how could God let this happen? To that, you say?"

Lotz replied, "I say God is also angry when he sees something like this. I would say also for several years now Americans in a sense have shaken their fist at God and said, God, we want you out of our schools, our government, our business, we want you out of our marketplace. And God, who is a gentleman, has just quietly backed out of our national and political life, our public life. Removing his hand of blessing and protection.."

Anne Graham Lotz blamed American culture for 9/11. Basically, she's saying "God's gonna getcha for that." Wouldn't that mean that Anne Graham Lotz believes that God, with vengeance, was, in some way, with those hijackers on that fateful September morning? Is that what the "gentleman God" in Lotz' head is all about? Perhaps she'd believe, following her logic, that her "gentleman God" was so angry and saddened with American culture that He allowed the President and his administration to lie to the American public and send us to unnecessary war? I wonder what Anne would say about Iraq? In my search for any comment whatsoever on Google, I am only met with her glaring silence on Iraq.

This and many other moral confusions and hypocrisies are what makes America such a mockable spectacle to secularists around the world. I'm sick to death of these hypocrisies (whether or not the people truly believe what they're saying). I'm hoping Americans will soon come to their senses and work together for a land where we can exist at peace with one another and tend to our common values and goals.

God has been used to raise emotion on Memorial Day, and I believe there is a proper and fitting place for God in the National observance of the holiday. It doesn't rest with the loons of the far right, however. It rests with the trust, love and devotion that the individual soldier holds in his or her heart.

One listen to the music and poetry of "Each Time You Tell Their Story" (Real Audio) by Sam Hazo will help you to understand this.

"To honor them, why speak of duty
or the will of governments?

Think first of love each time you
tell their story.

It gives their sacrifice a name and takes from war its glory."

I weep for the men and women we've lost in Iraq. My heart is torn to shreds over their loss. They have my undying love, thanks, and respect.

I believe in God. My faith has not been shaken by 9/11 or by the sickening path by which President Bush's foreign policy has led us. My fervent prayer is that God forgives us for the careless and arrogant mistakes the Bush administration has made in Iraq - in the name of the People of America.

I dedicate this post and Memorial Day to Pat Tillman and his family.

Arianna on Hillary's Confusing Iraq Statement

Arianna on Hillary's Confusing Iraq Statement
Why on Earth is Hillary speaking this way?! Arianna Huffington points out the importance of clarity and longs for a 2008 Democratic presidential candidate who owns a dictionary where the words "political poison" appear under the definition of "equivocate".

Why can’t Democratic leaders talk straight about Iraq? The latest example is Hillary Clinton on CNN: "You know, I am not one who feels comfortable setting exit strategies. We don't know what we're exiting from. We don't know what the situation is moving toward…. How do we know where we're headed, when we don't know where we are?"

Wow. Very existential. Very Zen koan. If a foreign policy disintegrates in the desert and no one hears it fail, what does this mean for our country and for our safety? Do you hear that? It’s the sound of one Greek gagging. I’ve just decided that I do have a litmus test for the 2008 Democratic nominee: someone who can utter, in plain English, an unambiguous, unequivocal sentence about Iraq.

Read more here.

Jim Goldsborough on John Bolton

Jim Goldsborough on John Bolton

Jim Goldsborough continues to be a strong voice of reason. In his recent column titled "We Deserve John Bolton", he says:

"The new Anglo-Saxon Crusade against the infidels is a disaster. We have killed tens of thousands of innocent people with our bombs and turned a functioning nation into a hellhole. The murdering will not stop and our reputation will not begin to be restored until we are gone -- and even then it will take decades or even centuries. Our armed forces, which opposed this war, have seen their reputation besmirched again, and we are implicated in torture and human rights abuses as never before.

This is the America Bush has given us. This is the America that deserves John Bolton at the United Nations."