Big Brass Blog is a group blog founded in February of 2005 by Pam Spaulding of Pam's House Blend and Melissa McEwan of Shakesville (formerly Shakespeare's Sister). The mission of this collaborative effort is to stand as the premiere forum where strong, enduring voices of Progressivism provide what liberal politics has been missing: the unapologetic, unrelenting voice of liberalism in the darkness visited upon our world by Right-wing extremists, their ruinous policies, and their hypocritical beliefs.
I was under the impression that the emergency teams who responded to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 are considered American heroes. The nation's support for these men and women is unequivocal and unending.
At least, that was my impression. I guess I underestimated congressional Republicans again.
House Republican leadership is advising its members to vote against a bipartisan bill that would, among other things, bolster medical support to Sept. 11 victims.
... We're left with Republicans, in an election year, taking a bold stand against funding for medical care for 9/11 heroes.
Show your concern for your local Progressive, or Liberal Congressman or Candidate. Please feel free to substitute your name.
Dear Democratic Incumbent or Candidate,
I’m writing this to let you know I’m worried, worried about you. You see, the last group of Democrats that won in 2008 by such a “mandate” promised progressives, liberals and moderates to get us out of the financial and military mess the Bush Administration got us into.
We see that for whatever reason, most of the Democrats we voted in are now supporting bills that benefit Big Business, Banks and the Military over the concerns of tax payers. They promised us help with a health care bill but didn’t deliver. They promised no more funding for the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but continue to throw our tax money at corrupt regimes (the ones over seas, too). They promised to bring home American soldiers so no more would have die for an illegal war, but didn’t deliver. They promised relief from credit card rip offs, but didn’t deliver. They promised help for the housing situation and help to families facing foreclosures and families who lost their homes because of greedy bankers and Wall Street schemes, but didn’t deliver. They are even thinking of reducing or gutting social security, Medicare and Medicaid so millions of seniors will suffer and most probably die well before they normally would have.
But the main reason I’m writing this is about my concern for your political future. You see, there’s this talk about the Republicans winning big in November 2010 and 2012 because the Democrats in power didn’t do nearly enough for the people they pledged to represent and the people are blaming the Democrats! Imagine that! Based on the Bush years, a Republican takeover of the House or Senate this year or in two could spell another long term disaster for the country and people...and your political ambitions.
Now this Republican sweep won’t affect most of the Senior Democrats already in Congress because when they lose their seats, they’ve already shown business what they can do for them and they can always go to work for Corporate America as consultants or lobbyists and make an exceptionally fine living. But if you’ve only been in Congress a few years, why, businesses may think you don’t quite have what they want yet or aren’t sure enough of you. They will look elsewhere (probably your Republican replacements) for those coveted, high paying positions that could have been yours.
If you are an aspiring candidate promising what you can’t deliver, chances are you’ll lose to a Republican next election. And since the mood of the people is swinging away from the Democrats making it more and more probably that you will lose the election, you will also lose your chance at all the big money you could make after you leave office! Now that can’t be good, can it?
You see, if you don’t help the people you promised you’d help, there’s a good chance that you WILL lose the coming election. And if you lose the election, well, there goes the chance at that great business or K Street offer!
I’m really concerned for you! I mean, how can a business expect to hire you if you don’t first show you can be supportive of their agendas? And the only way to do that is get into office. And the only way to stay in office to build the trust of business is to do the will of the people so they’ll keep electing you so you can keep impressing business. I know that’s a bit of a conundrum and it means you’ll sometimes have to compromise to the people instead of business but that’s politics. Call it the Political “Circle of Life.”
With the advent of Citizens United, you may think most support for you will come from business and won’t worry about constituent contributions. Those big bucks can also go to your opponent. And no matter how many millions business spends on you and your opponent, it still comes down to one person, one vote. If you should win and those voters don’t like what you did while in office or what you promised during your campaign (and didn’t deliver), all that money won’t keep you there.
Even if you don’t think of the voters as people you depend on for your job, at least think of your family. How would you like to have to survive on a paltry private sector job when you have visions of everything a political career would offer?
During your campaigning, please consider what could happen if you don’t support the views of progressives, liberals and moderates. You could be just as easily outsourcing a job you want - YOUR JOB - that coveted political position - and your financial future, to a Republican. Wouldn’t that be just terrible?
The House prepared Tuesday to send President Barack Obama a major war-funding increase of $33 billion to pay for his troop surge in Afghanistan, unmoved by the leaking of classified military documents that portray a military effort struggling between 2004 and 2009 against a strengthening insurgency.
The House of Representatives on Tuesday gave final approval to a nearly $59 billion emergency spending bill, the bulk of which would go toward the U.S. troop buildup in Afghanistan.
Specifically, the bill includes almost $33 billion for Afghanistan, along with over $5 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, almost $3 billion for Haiti relief programs and $68 million for the oil disaster response in the Gulf of Mexico.
It now goes to the president for his signature.
H R 4899 — QUESTION: On Motion to Suspend the Rules, Recede from the House Amdt, and Concur in the Senate Amdt
The reconstruction money was from oil revenue it was entrusted with between 2004 and 2007, according to a newly released audit that underscores a pattern of poor record-keeping.
The Defense Department is unable to properly account for $8.7 billion out of $9.1 billion in Iraqi oil revenue entrusted to it between 2004 and 2007, according to a newly released audit that underscores a pattern of poor record-keeping during the war.
Of that amount, the military failed to provide any records at all for $2.6 billion in purported reconstruction expenditure, says the report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, which is responsible for monitoring U.S. spending in Iraq. The rest of the money was not properly deposited in special accounts as required under Treasury Department rules, making it difficult to trace how it was spent.
Though there is no apparent evidence of fraud, the improper accounting practices add to the pattern of mismanagement, reckless spending and, in some instances, corruption uncovered by the agency since 2004, when it was created to oversee the total of $53 billion in U.S. taxpayer money appropriated by Congress for the reconstruction effort.
"It's harder to tell whether the elected officials and their appointees in sensitive places like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the FBI had a clue as to the scale of misconduct in the financial sector, or if they were bought off plain and simple, or just too stupid to understand what was going on all around them. The term "regulatory capture" provides valuable insight. How could Christopher Cox at the SEC fail to notice the stupendous malfeasance in the mortgage-related securities rackets. Why isn't he working for fifty cents a day in the laundry of Allenwood Federal Correctional Facility? Why is the grifter of Countrywide mortgage favors, Christopher Dodd, still free to guzzle the fabled bean soup in the Senate lunch room? I could go on in this vein for two hundred pages, but you get the drift."
This week is going to be all about Afghanistan. That's thanks to Wikileaks, an online depository for the kinds of documents that are not, under any circumstances, supposed to be publicly disclosed, much less posted on the Internet. Today the site has published some 92,000 U.S. classified government documents chronicling five years of the war in Afghanistan. As The New York Times puts it, they are, "a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year." [snip]
Wikileaks multiplied the impact of the release -- perhaps by an incalculable amount -- by disclosing the documents weeks ago to three of the biggest western news institutions: The New York Times, The Guardian in London, and Der Spiegel in Germany. Each news outlet has taken a different tack and used varying judgments as to what to publish and what to censor.
As the documents spread, more revelations, patterns, and possibly even more disclosures will follow. Certainly there will be talk of this journalistic moment’s likeness to the publishing of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.
A lot of sensitive information about the war in Afghanistan has been leaked thru Wikileaks, and the Guardian has set up a site to examine it. The New York Times and Der Spiegel were also recipients of the classified information and are doing their own articles. There is plenty of disturbing stuff. One thing that is disturbing is the Taliban's incredible indifference to protecting innocent civilian life.
One of the best investigative journalists who has been reporting on America's wars is Seymour Hersh. Hersh has been ahead of the pack -- revealing hard-to-believe atrocities far before the political marketplace was often ready or willing to accept his reporting.
The extraordinary posting on WikiLeaks of more than 92,000 classified documents on America's military activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan confirms Hersh's claims of battlefield executions and death squads.
U.S. officials have condemned the release of thousands of secret military and intelligence reports about the war in Afghanistan by the website Wikileaks.
The more than 91,000 documents, released Sunday, reveal new details about the war in Afghanistan, including the close relationship of the Pakistani military with Afghan insurgents. They also describe numerous accounts of brutality, corruption, extortion and kidnapping committed by members of the Afghan police force.
The documents were written by soldiers and intelligence officers, Wikileaks said.
Shocking in scope if not in content, the leak of 91,000 classified U.S. records on the Afghanistan war by the whistle-blower website Wikileaks.org is one of the largest unauthorized disclosures in military history.
The documents cover much of what the public already knows about the troubled nine-year conflict: U.S. spec-ops forces have targeted militants without trial, Afghans have been killed by accident, and U.S. officials have been infuriated by alleged Pakistani intelligence cooperation with the very insurgent groups bent on killing Americans.
WikiLeaks posted the documents Sunday. The New York Times, London's Guardian newspaper and the German weekly Der Spiegel were given early access to the records.
The release was instantly condemned by U.S. and Pakistani officials as both potentially harmful and irrelevant.
White House national security adviser Gen. Jim Jones said the release "put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk." In a statement, he then took pains to point out that the documents describe a period from January 2004 to December 2009, mostly during the administration of President George W. Bush. And, Jones added, before President Obama announced a new strategy.
I don't know if Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry has ever met Daniel Ellsberg or not, but with this statement -- which stands in stark contrast to the condemnatory comments from the White House about the WikiLeaks Afghanistan War Logs -- Kerry shows he has a respect for Pentagon Papers moments. . .
"However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan. Those policies are at a critical stage and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent."
The American people are hurting. As a result of the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street, millions of Americans have lost their jobs, homes, life savings and their ability to get a higher education. Today, some 22 percent of our children live in poverty, and millions more have become dependent on food stamps for their food. [snip]
But, not everybody is hurting. While the middle class disappears and poverty increases the wealthiest people in our country are not only doing extremely well, they are using their wealth and political power to protect and expand their very privileged status at the expense of everyone else. This upper-crust of extremely wealthy families are hell-bent on destroying the democratic vision of a strong middle-class which has made the United States the envy of the world. In its place they are determined to create an oligarchy in which a small number of families control the economic and political life of our country. [snip]
Today, not content with huge tax breaks on their income; not content with massive corporate tax loopholes; not content with trade laws enabling them to outsource the jobs of millions of American workers to low-wage countries and not content with tax havens around the world, the ruling elite and their lobbyists are working feverishly to either eliminate the estate tax or substantially lower it. If they are successful at wiping out the estate tax, as they came close to doing in 2006 with every Republican but two voting to do, it would increase the national debt by over $1 trillion during a ten-year period. At a time when we already have a $13 trillion debt, enormous unmet needs and the highest level of wealth inequality in the industrialized world, it is simply obscene to provide more tax breaks to multi-millionaires and billionaires.
That is why I have introduced the Responsible Estate Tax Act (S.3533).
Pilot Capt. Brian Bews ejects as his a CF-18 fighter jet plummets to the ground during a practice flight at the Lethbridge County Airport on Friday, July 23 for the weekend airshow in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. The pilot was taken to Chinook Regional Hospital with undetermined injuries.
Federal checks could begin flowing again as early as next week to millions of jobless people who lost up to seven weeks of unemployment benefits in a congressional standoff.
President Barack Obama on Thursday signed into law a restoration of benefits for people who have been out of work for six months or more. Congress approved the measure earlier in the day.
H.R.5618, Restoration of Emergency Unemployment Compensation Act of 2010
For the last couple of days, there has been wide media coverage of the Shirley Sherrod story, including (incompetent and absurd) coverage from Faux (Not) News. Including this:
Shirley Sherrod, the Department of Agriculture employee forced to resign over misleadingly edited footage showing her making "racist" remarks at an NAACP meeting, has lashed out at Fox News and conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart, accusing their journalistic practices of being a manifestation of racism.
"When you look at their reporting, this is just another way of seeing that they are (racist)," Sherrod told MediaMatters' Joe Strupp.
Her comments came ahead of Wednesday's apologies to Sherrod from White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who took the blame for Sherrod's forced resignation. [snip]
As the political tide quickly shifted in Sherrod's favor, embarrassed reporters and bloggers began to backtrack on their reporting of Sherrod's comments as "racist" earlier this week. At Fox News, which played an instrumental role in publicizing the video, a news host even suggested that the network didn't air the story to begin with.
Responding to an NAACP press release in which the activist group said it was "snookered by Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Breitbart" into believing Sherrod had treated a white couple in a racist manner 24 years ago, Fox's Bret Baier responded: "Fox News didn't even do the story. We didn't do it on Special Report, we posted it online...."
However, MediaMatters has chronicled the extensive coverage given the story on Fox News before it turned out the tape had been edited to make an anecdote about racial reconciliation appear to be a racist rant.
In the wake of the embarrassing scandal, everyone from the White House to the news media is being criticized for its handling. But many prominent voices are now speaking up about what they see as a pattern of disinformation and deceit coming from conservative activist journalists.
Fake journalism strikes again. Right-wing nut and whack-job Andrew Breitbart releases yet another selectively edited video. Another wing-nutty conspiracy to deceive? Maybe.
Tonight, we're taking on the story of Shirley Sherrod. An African American worker at Agriculture, she lost her job yesterday after Andrew Brietbart's Big Government site posted video of her recent speech to an NAACP gathering. In the version posted by Big Government, Sherrod says that she wasn't as motivated to help a white farmer who talked down to in her former job, in the 1980s.
It appears that Big Government left behind the moral of Sherrod's story, which is that she came to see the importance of treating people equally. Meanwhile, the white farming family in question defends Sherrod, saying she saved their land.
Rachel Maddow looks at the full context of Shirley Sherrod's comments and points out the spinelessness of the White House in buying into yet another Fox News/Breitbart smear job and how, like feeding a dog from the table, handing heads to the right wing only encourages the use of dishonest tactics. [ 13:35 ]
* * * * *
NAACP chief on being 'snookered' by Fox News
Benjamin Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, talks about the mistake he made believing Fox News propaganda in the case of Shirley Sherrod, and how the NAACP has been handling being targeted by tea party activists. [ 12:02 ]
Sherrod belonged to an organization set up during the civil rights era specifically to help black farmers. So, yes, she had some reservations the first time she was approached for help by a white farmer. Then she sent him to a white lawyer for help, because she thought the white lawyer would help one of his own kind. But she learned an important lesson that day: When you're poor, no one wants to help you, no matter your race!
Because the entire point of Sherrod's story was to illustrate how her eyes were opened to that fact, she went on in her speech to explain that she "eventually worked with the man over a two-year period to help ward off foreclosure of his farm and ... eventually became friends with him and his wife."
This has been corroborated by the actual discriminated-against white people in question.
But that part isn't in the clip that Breitbart posted.
But even if we were to “win,” what then? As Tom Engelhardt wrote last week on the website TomDispatch.com, “We would be in minimalist possession of the world’s fifth poorest country. We would be in minimal possession of the world’s second most corrupt country. We would be in minimal possession of the world’s foremost narco-state, the only country that essentially produces a drug monocrop, opium. In terms of the global war on terror, we would be in possession of a country that the director of the CIA now believes to hold 50 to 100 al-Qaeda operatives (‘maybe less’) -- for whom parts of the country might still be a ‘safe haven.’ And for this, and everything to come, we would be paying, at a minimum, $84 billion a year.”
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
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