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In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford "very strongly" disagreed with the current president's justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney -- Ford's White House chief of staff -- and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford's chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.he coulda told folks bout this as well:
"Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said. "And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do."
"Well, I can understand the theory of wanting to free people," Ford said, referring to Bush's assertion that the United States has a "duty to free people." But the former president said he was skeptical "whether you can detach that from the obligation number one, of what's in our national interest." He added: "And I just don't think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security."not that mr bush wood listen to nobidy that wudnt alreddy sayin whut he wonts to here, witch how kin we send this man a message? we march by the hunderds of thousunds, vote as strongly as we kin to tell im we dont wonta pore more gasoline on the iraqi fire, n all he kin say is surge, even tho whut he proposin is more lack a spurt than a surge. corse, a real surge wood take troops n at this point that wood take a draft (or a change of hart by all them 101st keyboarders who support the war in thar pjs -- magine the surge we wood have ifn they all volunteerd!?!).
Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:the two idees dont hardly seem to fit. meanwhile, heres santa his ownself, perusin the daily news while waitin fer a train ...
But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
A single parent with two children working at minimum wage earns $10,700 a year, which $4,700 below the U.S. poverty level. Forbes magazine reported there are now 374 U.S. billionaires who have more wealth than the bottom 95% of the U.S. population.
The number of billionaires surged this year, as did their collective pile of cash, according to Forbes magazine's annual billionaire list.
The magazine said the number of billionaires worldwide increased by 102 people in 2006 to 793, a record number, largely due to bullish global stock markets. Their total net worth jumped 18 percent to $2.6 trillion.
Equipment shipped back from Iraq is stacking up at all the Army depots: More than 530 M1 tanks, 220 M88 wreckers and 160 M113 armored personnel carriers are sitting at Anniston. The Red River Army Depot in Texas has 700 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and 450 heavy and medium-weight trucks, while more than 1,000 Humvees are awaiting repair at the Letterkenny Army Depot in Pennsylvania.
Despite the work piling up, the Army's depots have been operating at about half their capacity because of a lack of funding for repairs. In the spring, a funding gap caused Anniston and other depots to lose about a month's worth of work, said Brig. Gen. Robert Radin, deputy chief of staff for operations at the Army Materiel Command at Fort Belvoir.
"Last year we spent as much time trying to find available money as managing our program," he said. "We don't want to go into the next rotation . . . with equipment that's at the far end of its expected life."
The new chief of the U.S. General Services Administration is trying to limit the ability of the agency's inspector general to audit contracts for fraud or waste and has said oversight efforts are intimidating the workforce, according to government documents and interviews.
GSA Administrator Lurita Alexis Doan, a Bush political appointee and former government contractor, has proposed cutting $5 million in spending on audits and shifting some responsibility for contract reviews to small, private audit contractors.
A decade into the practice of medicine, still striving to become “a well regarded physician-scientist,"Robert H. Glassman concluded that he was not making enough money. So he answered an ad in the New England Journal of Medicine from a business consulting firm hiring doctors.
And today, after moving on to Wall Street as an adviser on medical investments, he is a multimillionaire.
Such routes to great wealth were just opening up to physicians when Dr. Glassman was in school, graduating from Harvard College in 1983 and Harvard Medical School four years later. Hoping to achieve breakthroughs in curing cancer, his specialty, he plunged into research, even dreaming of a Nobel Prize, until Wall Street reordered his life.
Just how far he had come from a doctor’s traditional upper-middle-class expectations struck home at the 20th reunion of his college class. By then he was working for Merrill Lynch and soon would become a managing director of health care investment banking.
NOT long ago, I had the pleasure of a lengthy meeting with one of the smartest men on the planet, Warren E. Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, in his unpretentious offices in Omaha. We talked of many things that, I hope, will inspire me for years to come. But one of the main subjects was taxes. Mr. Buffett, who probably does not feel sick when he sees his MasterCard bill in his mailbox the way I do, is at least as exercised about the tax system as I am.
Put simply, the rich pay a lot of taxes as a total percentage of taxes collected, but they don’t pay a lot of taxes as a percentage of what they can afford to pay, or as a percentage of what the government needs to close the deficit gap.
Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.
It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?"he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”
Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.
“There’s class warfare, all right,"Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
On Friday, the American Bar Association hosted a conference in Washington on national security. Among the speakers was Scott Stucky, General Counsel of the Senate Committee on Armed Services and President Bush’s nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. When the subject of the amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill that protected military families from payday lenders, according to someone in the audience, Stucky dismissed it as “junk.”
The Department of Defense had asked Congress to cap interest rates to military families at 36%, effectively outlawing the 400% loans and other high priced lending practices that the military said “undermine military readiness, harms the morale of troops and their families, and add to the cost of fielding an all-volunteer fighting force.” Sorry, Mr. Stucky, but this isn't just “junk.”
DoD had done its best to make clear that predatory lending affects troop readiness. The Center for Responsible Lending estimated that the payday lenders had one in five military families in their clutches. After the DoD report came out, statistics also showed that there had been a nine-fold increase in the number of troops who have lost their security clearances because of debt problem, further undercutting our ability to field an effective fighting force.
The elections are over and America has fallen for the al-taqiyya and distortions of the Democratic Party, rolled over on their backs, and surrendered to al-Qaeda. Radical Islam has won a very important victory, and the West is now full on its way to defeat. You are loosing [sic] the war on terror - the one that people like Nancy Pelosi don't think exists. Mohammad and even al-Zarqawi are laughing their asses off from their graves - they now know that America is too weak to fight their ideology and that you will surely be defeated.frum strat-sphere:
Bin Laden and Zawahiri and all the rest of the goose-stepping Islamo fascists are probably besides themselves with glee right now. And every brave Iraqi who stood up to take control of their country, who braved suicide bombs to vote, are probably cowering in fear. The Democrats are coming, with people like Keith Olberman at their head spewing insults and conspiracy theories.but thays 'good news' too, as hugh hewitt rites:
President Bush will not flag in the pursuit of the war, and Senator Santorum is now available for a seat on the SCOTUS should one become available. GOP senators will have the chance to select leadership equal to the new world of politics which, as the past two years have demonstrated, does not reward timidity.thays sumthin name of balloon juice that rites these perdickshuns:
Tomorrow, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, and Chuck Schumer come over to my house, and, at taser-point, I am forced to give all my money, have an abortion, and promise I will never ever enjoy gun violence on TV. Afterwards, they hand me the new National Anthem- in Spanish. Afterwards, we are we are all forced to attend a mandatory rally for the Democrats and Al-Qaeda, because, after all- the terrorists have won.then ye gut riehls world view:
The Democrat Platform that isn't there, save for the usual pandering with our tax dollars.... In other news, the Dems are up to their usual BS - crying and whining about everything. Because if Liberals don't win, why there must be something wrong. I don't think I've ever heard anything more arrogant than Pelosi the other day when she basically said, "The numbers are there. If we get an honest count." That, before the polls opened. These people are a disgrace to democracy.(looks lack nancy pelosi wuz rite bout whut wood happen with a fair count ... jes sayin). larry kudlow splains how black is white, up is down, n good is evil:
Look at blue dog conservative Dem victories, and look at Northeast liberal GOP defeats. The changeover in the House may well be a conservative victory, not a liberal one. Blue dogs are rabid budget balancers.(so them publicans won after all? btw, long as them publicans caint say the word 'Democratic' when talkin bout the Democratic Party, i bleeve they should be called 'Publicans,' but thats jes this ole hillbilly talkin). but wait, thays more, frum sumthin called iowa voice:
I think we're in for two years of defeat and retreat, pandering to Islamic extremists, extreme political correctness, multi-culturalism, open borders beyond belief, amnesty...in other words, we're going back to the 1970s, right after Vietnam. This is what the Democrats wanted to do, because that was their heyday, when they last had this kind of power.all of this stuff cums by way of The Daou Report in Salon, witch ye gut to have a subscripshun to git it. for the last quote, ye kin read how Thinking Meat dun tuck this fellers 'logick' apart:
From this day forward, every soldier that perishes in SW Asia is blood on the hands of Speaker Pelosi until every soldier comes home.sorry bout the quote fest, speshly since tiz of such vile stuff. mayhap blogger will be up early in the mornin!
We Are the Rubberstamplicans!
We are the Rubberstamplicans
We Rubber Stamp the laws
We do not think, we do not blink
Mere winning is our cause
We stayed up late one night to pass that medicare fiasco
We did it though it was as fun as drinking pure Tabasco
We know that "government's the problem" so why should we try
To govern well since that would tell the truth to our great lie?
We cut the taxes of the rich, sent soldiers off to war
We built the largest deficit the world had seen before
To those who say we must be madder than the maddest hatter
We simply parrot Cheney saying, "Deficits don't matter!"
For we are the Rubberstamplicans
We Rubber Stamp the laws
We do not think, we do not blink
Mere winning is our cause
If Bush says black is white or dirty air is really clean
We'll Rubber Stamp the notion with our Rubber Stamp Machine
If Bush says building roads and cutting trees make forests healthy
We'll Rubber Stamp the falsehood and thus make our cronies wealthy.
We will not check our president although he breaks the law
For like all Rubberstamplicans, when shocked we stand in awe.
Besides three decades in the past that FISA law was hatched
To be secure we must endure having our freedoms snatched!
For we are the Rubberstamplicans
We Rubber Stamp the laws
We do not think, we do not blink
Mere winning is our cause
Like Bush in Iraq, President Johnson had hoped to bring some soldiers home in 1965 when South Vietnamese troops had been properly trained to take on their own security. "Now there is no more talk of being out by 1965 -- or any other year in the foreseeable future," Time said in 1964. "After three years of intensive effort and considerable pain, including the expenditure of $3.3 billion in aid and the loss of 262 Americans killed, 1,196 wounded or injured . . . the war is still not being discernibly won." So Johnson sent in more soldiers.but thays even skeerier enemies, lack reality bout the earth! sumbidy better splain to our leaders in washington how reality is mad n bout to git back at us lessun we take it a lil more serious. or is them brits betrayin thar allies?
(We needed to whip the defeatocratsSure, "Mission Accomplished" came too early –
But the media made it seem we were losing –
Now we have those wily Democrats
Attacking the winning slogans we're using!)
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