Don’t take your eye off of Bush

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing



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The only thing that seems to be in the news is McCain, Hillary and Obama with an occasional smattering of tornado coverage and a few blurbs about gas prices. I rarely see any recent coverage on MSM about Iraq. Last night I saw that same old tired file footage of the Al Qaeda training video that has run since 9-11 - you know, the one with the Jihadis on monkey bars.

When I see these reports this morning, it makes me think Bush wants to wait till these deals go though before the US strikes.

Iran eyes Azeri Shakh-Deniz gas from Caspian Sea

Iran is interested in buying significant amounts of gas from the second phase of ex-Soviet Azerbaijan's largest gas field, Shakh-Deniz, in the Caspian Sea, an Azeri government source told Reuters on Wednesday.

The second, $10 billion phase of Shakh-Deniz is expected to come on stream towards the end of 2013.

"Iran's deputy oil minister and the general manager of its state gas company spoke to the management of (Azeri state oil firm) Socar over importing some seriously large volumes from Shakh-Deniz's second phase," the source said.

Iran sees gas pipeline deal with India, Pakistan by mid-year

Iran's ambassador to New Delhi said Tehran hopes to finalise a gas pipeline deal with India and Pakistan by mid-year, in an interview released on Wednesday.

The 7.5-billion-dollar project which aims to transport natural gas from Iranian oilfields to Pakistan and India was discussed during a visit to India last month Iranian by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"It is hoped the trilateral agreement will be signed by the middle of summer this year," Iran's ambassador to India Sayed Mahdi Nabizadeh was quoted as saying in an interview in the latest issue of India's Hardnews magazine.

I just think we are taking our eye off of Bush way too much. When he is NOT watched, he tends to exercise his powers of dictatorship more readily.



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What Do You Call It?

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My View of Mission Accomplished

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SPECIAL REQUEST FOR TCD FANS: The San Francisco Chronicle is pondering the addition of new cartoons for their paper - a process that seems to be initiated by Darren Bell, creator of Candorville (one of my daily reads - highly recommended). You can read the Chronicle article here and please add your thoughts to the comments if you wish. If anything, put in a good word for Darren and Candorville.

I am submitting Town Called Dobson to the paper for their consideration. They seem to have given great weight to receiving 200 messages considering Candorville. I am asking TCD fans to try to surpass that amount. (I get more than that many hate mails a day, surely fans can do better?)

This is not a race between Darren and I, it is a hope that more progressive strips can be represented in the printed press of America.

So if you read the San Francisco Chronicle or live in the Bay Area (Google Analytics tell me there are a lot of you), please send your kind comments (or naked, straining outrage) to David Wiegand at his published addresses below. If you are a subscriber, cut out your mailing label and staple it to a TCD strip and include it in your letter.

candorcomment@sfchronicle.com

or

David Wiegand
Executive Datebook Editor
The San Francisco Chronicle
901 Mission St.
San Francisco, CA 94103

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The Poll-O-Tron 2300

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My Disappointment of Hillary

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I do not get it.

Back during the first go-around with the Iraq war, it is clear Congress was lied to - we all were. They should have known better than to let Bush commit us to preemptive war, but they didn't. So you would think when the drum beat starts up for Iran, Congress would be a lot wiser.

I thought they would be too until I saw the disappointing support of Kyl-Lieberman. Been there and done that but still Congress, a Democratically led Congress, can't get enough war. And the worst part was Hillary Clinton's support of it. What The Fuck?

For me, that was the last straw.

If we invade Iran, we will occupy a swath of Earth that ranges from Europe to China - from Saudi Arabia to the Former Soviet Union. That my friends is nation-building on a Roman scale. I have had enough of that. Honestly.

Support for an Iranian war is beyond excusable, it should be seen as treasonous. I don't want to get on that "Bill Clinton is a traitor" line of bullshit left over from the 90's, but a war with Iran is wrong on a multitude of fronts, firstly being it is un-American.

I'll take UFO's over war any day.

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The Goracle of Memphis and his stealth campaign.

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On May 20th, 2007 in the New York Times, Gore remarked...

Having spent 30 years as part of the political dialogue, I don’t know why a 600-day campaign is taken as a given, and why people who aren’t in it 600 days out for the convenience of whatever brokers want to close the door and narrow the field and say, ‘This is it, now let’s place your bets’ — If they want to do that, fine. I don’t have to play that game.

With recent Current TV video uploads, I must wonder what kind of campaign is he running?

In marketing/advertising terms, this is a stealth product release. The candidate is running, but the paperwork hasn't been filed. The Current clips are strong. In the link above, some of thecommenters suggest Gore may be trying to frame the debate. I doubt this. First of all, with the exception of Edwards and Kucinich , none of the other Dem candidates really have an environmental platform that does anything about global climate change. If they aren't listening to Gore now, they never will.

Gore has been successful in moving the issue to the front of the news, and the melting icecaps, crop failures and record drought have all backed him up with common sense observation - just ask the average family farmer.

I have no idea what the game plan is for Gore but he has been successful in keeping himself and more importantly the issues he cares about, at the forefront of the news since he stepped in front of theMoveOn.org microphone and blasted the Bush administration over Iraq.

Everything he claimed in his "In The Balance" book, his 2000 campaign and everything else since has proven to be right. Whereas everythingBushCo has said since then has turned out to be a lie.

Bush may be the guy Middle America wanted to have a beer with, but once in office, Middle America learned Bush just stiffed them for the bar tab. As I speak with people across the country, they tell me they can't help but look at Gore and wonder "what if?" Since the Clinton/Gore administration was all over AlQaeda and the Taleban before Middle America knew they existed, would 9-11 have happened at all? Would all of America have their phones bugged and emails read? Would China have eaten our lunch? Would Summer at the North Pole feel like a spring day in Myrtle Beach? Would we be bogged down in a Vietnam style war in Iraq while ogling the oil underneath Iran?

If Bush invades Iran, the US will control everything in the Middle East from Saudi Arabia to the former Soviet Union - from Europe to China. There hasn't been a land grab like that since (yes, I am going to say it so get over it already) the Nazi's controlled everything from Paris to with 15 miles of the Kremlin.

Where Gore takes us from here is anyone's guess, except maybe Karl Rove. I think he might be sweating.

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The PR Battle of Iran

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Seriously, there is probably a group of individuals, hunkered down in the bowels of the Pentagon or White House, coming up with a catchy phrase for when Bush bombs the ever-lovin' shit out of Iran.

They will narrow down the selection to maybe less than a dozen then they will present the selections to a series of focus groups. Once the propaganda unit has finished with the focus group (and disposed of the bodies, IMO) the selections will be narrowed to three or so slogans. The PR copy will then be sent to the speechwriters to see how the different slogans can be worked into the daily churn of BS that flows from the Administration and their lackeys. The slogan will also be tested for the President's dictum and cadence.

Once all of that has been done, the new slogan will emerge in a "slow flourish" and within a week, the slogan will be everywhere.

My choice for a slogan that probably won't get used is "the next colossal fuck-up."

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Kucinich: A Monk On the Road From Burma

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With all the noise on mainstream media and fake rage from the White House over the slaughter in Burma, still we have only one candidate that has declared himself the peace candidate. Even in this time of the Iraq war where most of the population wants to bring the troops home, we only have ONE peace candidate.

That is a disconnect I cannot puzzle out.

I can understand the Republicans - the reach-around party, wanting to "double Gitmo" and wage continuous war, but the top three Dem candidates are as strong as watered-down tea when it comes to peace.

Is it safe to discuss peace in Burma because it is "near that Viet-Cong place?" Or does BushCo simple want the regime to chill so his corporate junta can get back to business?

As I try to ponder this, I am just going to sit around and Text PEACE to Dennis. God knows my elected officials aren't taking my calls.

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The Sulfur Smell of John McCain

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Meet The Press is hard enough to watch with Tim Russert asking pointless questions, but yesterday's show was brutally painful, mostly due to the appearance of John "Baghdad Walkabout" McCain.

From the transcript:

SEN. McCAIN: ...I hope that we will have the patience and the understanding on the part of the American people that they’ve made great sacrifice and all of us are saddened by it. But I hope we can also point out the consequences of failure, which is what the Democrats are proposing now.

SEN. KERRY: Listen to that. You just said the Democrats are proposing failure. We’ve had...

SEN. McCAIN: Yeah. (Unintelligible)...failure.

SEN. KERRY: ...four and a half years of failure. The Republicans stood up and cheered for Rumsfeld, who had a policy of not enough troops. To his credit, John at least said he needs more troops. But the fact is they’ve supported every step of this president, misleading America about the course of this war. Last January the president stood up to Americans. You know what he said, Tim? He said, “We will hold them accountable to their benchmarks.” They’re not holding them accountable. They have no means of holding them accountable because they’ve said we’re going to stay there with 130,000 troops into next summer. They have no leverage.

We are not proposing failure, as John loves to assert and Republicans loves to assert. We are proposing a way to strengthen America in the region. We’re proposing a way to, in fact, make Iraq successful to the degree that it can be by playing to the real undercurrents of their, of their cultural and historical divisions. Nothing in the surge addresses the question of Shia, Sunni divide. Nothing in the surge is going to resolve the fundamental reluctance of Iraqi politicians to make a decision, Tim.

Now, we’re not talking about abandoning the place. Why do the Republicans have a complete inability to envision a foreign policy, as we used to have, Republican and Democrat alike, which plays to our strengths and builds alliances with other countries? Bring the United Nations back in. Bring the neighbors into this. Have a standing summit in a standing conference where we resolve these differences as best as can be. The United States can’t do it alone. And we have to change the equation so we regain leverage and initiative. That’s not walking away, that’s walking forward and putting us in a stronger posture.

No where in the show does McCain offer any hint, solution, idea or Divine Jesus-Speak of a way for us to get out of Iraq. McCain and the GOP are constipated and can't think of any other idea other than to stay on the pot and hope everything comes out OK.

You know, like Saigon.

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Mesopotamia

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Should you support the troops?

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Never let it be said liberals don't support the troops.

During the first Gulf War, I began collecting books to send to my college friends serving in Saudi Arabia. I must have sent hundreds of books. When US troops got deployed to Iraq, I started doing it again but I knew the job was too big for one person to do it, so I set up Books For Soldiers, a 501 (c)(3) charity to send free books, dvds and video games to deployed US soldiers.

But I wasn't that smart since I only thought the war would last 6 weeks tops in Iraq. What was I thinking? Now, FOUR years later, we are still shipping books.

But today I need your help. There is a contest sponsored by VAJoe.com, they will contribute $2,000 to charitable military organizations next month in its Charity for Charities event. You can vote on your favorite charitable military organizations. The top four charitable organizations and a randomly selected organization will share $2,000 in donations from VAJoe. Books for Soldiers has been included in the event.

The Alexa Traffic Rank for BooksForSoldiers.com is 242,975 and you would not believe our bandwidth bills!

So today, I am asking (begging actually) for your vote for Books For Soldiers. It won't take you 30 seconds to help a liberal out!

CLICK HERE TO VOTE!

A short, fast and easy site registration is required.

P.S. Thank-you Michael Moore.

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Does this lead to minty fresh breath?

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How many times in American history have we fought wars over economics instead of human rights? The Revolutionary War was a fight for freedom and democracy, but it was for Whites only. The Civil War was about ending slavery but it took about a century for equal rights to bestowed upon African Americans and between those two events, we had two World Wars. In the last World War, we jailed people of Japanese descent just because of their ethnicity- even Americans that were born here were thrown into concentration camps - not in Gitmo, but in California, Arizona, Utah and many other states.

During the first Gulf War, we moved into the Middle East to kick out the Iraqis from Kuwait - a theocratic dictatorship with a horrible human rights record, but we rode into town and liberated the dictatorship of Kuwait.

Now we find ourselves in a fake war in Iraq with no real or visible reason other than the oil. When this nation is faced with war over Human rights, we flinch, or I should say, our government flinches.

It took a lot of courage to go into Kosovo. Even though there was heavy outcry by the GOP not to go into Kosovo and stop the genocide, we did and we were successful. The Taleban has been committing endless human rights violations for years, but it took a Saudi terror attack on the United States to get us to move on the Taleban (where the Saudi's weren't). But what about Darfur? You can throw a dart at Africa and chances are you will hit a dictator that is far worse than Saddam ever was, but into Iraq we went. Darfur continues to be ignored, just as we ignored Rwanda.

Oh, and maybe in another century after homosexuals gain equal rights, the Lakota will finally get the Black Hills back after it was stolen by the United States government.

Sadly, this country will never fight a war to bestow the equal rights owed to homosexuals - it will need to be a slow budding of awareness in the hearts of Americans. Society is changing, not fast enough for some and too fast for others. But the change and embracement will come.

Here is a little story to explain why I believe this. I am a Southern White Boy born in 1963 and my wife is a Strong Black Women born two years later. When we were born, it was illegal for Blacks and Whites to marry and it wasn't until 1967 that the last of the anti-miscegenation laws was struck down. Back in the 1960's, the racism in American was still very, very strong. Lynchings, rape and murder were all still a reality for Blacks in America.

But things changed and they changed rapidly. By the time I had arrived in high school in 1978, I was living in a small little rural town in North Carolina called, oddly enough, Dobson. Somehow, between 1967 and 1978, interracial dating had gone from being a suicidal taboo to being the "in" thing to do. I started dating, and snogging like no tomorrow, out of my race by the time I was 16. Channell and I have now been married for 14 and a half years and no one, except for one idiot uncle, has ever given us any grief over the color difference. They do ask why on earth a quality woman like Channell is with the likes of me, and sometimes I wonder that myself!

Color? No one cares. Soon, no idea when but soon, no one will care if two women get married. Or two men and just as color fell away from most, so will orientation.

Humans will still have hang-ups and some things will still be seen as outlandishly unacceptable by society, like what if someone marries a philandering Republican that switches hookers as often as his socks? Well, that taste NEVER leaves your mouth.

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Cheney Dropped The Bomb, Now I am Fabulous!

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From the "I Kid You Not" file:

The US military investigated building a "gay bomb", which would make enemy soldiers "sexually irresistible" to each other, government papers say.
<..>
The plan for a so-called "love bomb" envisaged an aphrodisiac chemical that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among troops, causing what the military called a "distasteful but completely non-lethal" blow to morale.

And this jewel was a bit deeper:

A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting.

Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS 5 that military leaders had considered, and then subsquently rejected, building the so-called "Gay Bomb."
Edward Hammond, of Berkeley's Sunshine Project, had used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the proposal from the Air Force's Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio.

As part of a military effort to develop non-lethal weapons, the proposal suggested, "One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior."

The documents show the Air Force lab asked for $7.5 million to develop such a chemical weapon.

"The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soldiers to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistibly attractive to one another," Hammond said after reviewing the documents.

"The notion was that a chemical that would probably be pleasant in the human body in low quantities could be identified, and by virtue of either breathing or having their skin exposed to this chemical, the notion was that soldiers would become gay," explained Hammond.

I can't understand how this even became an idea? Does Halliburton hold the contract for the Cher Tour?



Editor's Note: Today some good friends of mine (which run this strip) are launching The Bilerico Project - a site with "Daily experiments in LGBTQ." This strip is for them.

What started off as a project to give the Indiana LGBT community a voice has now spilled over the border of Indiana and has gone national. Ya see? You give them gays an inch and they take the whole country! Next thing you know, I will running around in my underwear, kissing men at a showing of Rocky Horror... oh wait...

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Who knew there was good Dick in D.C.?

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When did GOP Senator from Indiana, Dick Lugar get a voice? Lugar came out swinging on the Senate floor yesterday in a full frontal assault (for him) on the Bush Administration's folly in Iraq.

Believe it or not, CNN said it best:

Two respected senior GOP senators this week publicly asked the president to look for a way out of Iraq. One of them -- Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana -- is the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"When Dick Lugar comes out against your foreign policy, it means your dam is breaking, and it means we're far more likely as a country to move from Plan A to Plan B this fall, when it comes to Iraq," said David Gergen, who has advised both Republican and Democratic presidents.

Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, is jumping straight to what he calls Plan "E" for "Exit."

"It's time for the United States to put together a comprehensive plan for gradual disengagement in Iraq," Voinovich said. "We're running out of time and I don't think it's fair to the next administration to say, 'Hey by the way, we're leaving this baby for you guys to figure out.' "

In a letter to the president, Voinovich, also a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, called for military disengagement and increased diplomatic engagement.

I am still picking myself off the floor. Voinovich's "Plan E" statement was a ball bat, studded with nails - he hit the carcass that is BushCo right out of the park.

Where did THEY get the courage to say no to Bush? Oh, I know. They must have found Pelosi's - ya know, she dropped hers a few weeks back!

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Things We Wish Hillary Would Say

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The thing that bugs me about Hillary is her inability to say something straight. In this respect she reminds me a lot of McCain but without the nutty Planter's aftertaste. One example is her weaseling around her excuse for her war vote. She was the last Dem to say the Iraq war was a bad idea - she still embraced it up until six months before the 06 elections!

However, I still think she has it in her to be forthright. That kind of bluntness is what Americans really want to hear right about now.

Note: Congrats to Daily Kos user, Ming Vase, for planting the idea for today's strip in my head!

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Political Suicide

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Harry Potter and the Blue Dog Democrats

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Inside The Watergate Basement

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Get ready to fight them here!

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It’s Memorial Day, have a hot dog.

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