I think this may be the first time anyone's said no to any kind of funding for this war. Acknowledging the corruption is the first step to getting out, because trying to stop corruption in Afghanistan is like trying to stop the tide:

The House Democrat who oversees funding for Afghanistan's redevelopment and reconstruction said on Monday that she is stripping money from her foreign aid bill in reaction to pervasive corruption. Dave Obey, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, supports the move made by subcommittee chairwoman Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), according to an Obey spokesman.

Lowey cited pervasive corruption in Afghanistan as the cause for her decision to pull the funding from the appropriations bill working its way through her State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee.

"I do not intend to appropriate one more dime for assistance to Afghanistan until I have confidence that U.S. taxpayer money is not being abused to line the pockets of corrupt Afghan government officials, drug lords and terrorists," said Lowey.

A Lowey spokesman said the restrictions would not apply to direct humanitarian assistance for projects such as refugee camps, but would limit funds for USAID and the State Department, which funnel money to reconstruction efforts -- money that is often siphoned many times over.

The request that Lowey is rejecting amounts to $3.9 billion for the 2011 fiscal year.

On Friday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she recently traveled to Afghanistan and found the corruption staggering. "I was just there for Mother's Day, in Afghanistan, that weekend, and traveled into the country even more remotely than Kandahar," Pelosi said in an interview in her office. "And the corruption issue, it's problematic. And you know what? A lot of it is our money."

"This is about systemic, huge money," she said.

[...] The chairman of the Senate subcommittee who oversees the same funding stream in the upper chamber is war opponent Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), who was chairing Elena Kagan's confirmation hearing and couldn't be reached.Pelosi said that she wasn't sure if there are enough votes in the House to approve funding for the war operations, either."I don't know how many votes there are in the caucus, even condition-based, for the war, hands down. I just don't. We'll see what the shape of it is the day of the vote," she said, but added that she believes President Obama's surge should be given time to work until the planned drawdown in 2011. "The thing is, is this president has to give his plan a chance until next year, when we have to withdraw them," she said.

A Lowey spokesman said that the chairwoman's move was a response to a Wall Street Journalreport about $3 billion in cash being openly flown out of Kabul International Airport over the past three years and a Washington Post item about top aides to President Hamid Karzai repeatedly derailing corruption probes.

Rumsfeld and the Powell Doctrine!

USATODAY

By John Diamond, Steve Komarow and Tom Squitieri, USA TODAY

excerpt:

Rumsfeld's plan

The strategy outlined by Rumsfeld and other top officials this week has three components:

• Use overwhelming ground force backed by artillery and air power to take control of the insurgent haven.

• Move in immediately with reconstruction efforts to repair battle damage.

• Leave a force in Fallujah large enough to prevent a collapse back into violence.

The goals are simple: to win the gratitude of Fallujah civilians who will no longer have to cope with Iraqi and foreign fighters in their midst; and to demonstrate to other insurgent-dominated towns and cities what can happen if they refuse to participate peacefully in the Iraqi political process.

Why didn't Rummy use this plan at the begining of the Iraq war? It sounds a lot like the Powell Doctrine!

This is getting ridiculous. Every time I turn on FOX NEWS they have another clip of Rosie O'Donnell cued up as they prepare to rip her.

In a new FOX News/Opinion Dynamics poll, (.pdf) one of the questions was:

3. – 10. I'm going to read you the names of several individuals and groups.
Please tell me whether you have a generally favorable or unfavorable opinion of
each one. If you've never heard of someone please just say so. (RANDOMIZE)
SCALE: 1. Favorable 2. Unfavorable 3. (Can't say) 4. Never heard of

Favor Unfav Can't Never
able orable say heard
Democratic Party 51% 35 13 1
Republican Party 39% 49 12 -
George W. Bush 38% 58 4 -
Dick Cheney 37% 53 8 2
Nancy Pelosi 33% 24 23 20
Donald Trump 30% 53 16 1
Robert Gates 28% 16 29 27
Rosie O'Donnell 25% 58 15 2

How many American troops were killed because Rosie spoke out on The View? How many Iraqi civilians died because Rosie spoke out on The View? How many Americans lost their health insurance because Rosie spoke out on The View? Has Rosie slowed up the reconstruction of NOLA because Rosie spoke out on The View? There are many other silly questions included...

The Agonist: Wake up and smell the drug war

Pacific Views: This type of frenzied opposition has been seen before

The Monkey Cage: Did Gays in the military lead to the fall of Srebrenica? Of course not!

Fables of the reconstruction: McCain and Lieberman propose bill to strip U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism of all rights

Seeing the Forest: China's currency manipulation manipulates the world. This is not a small issue

Prairie Weather: A solid foundation of lies may be cracking

As Eric Boehlert notes, Andrew Breitbart has a real credibility problem, and it extends well beyond his journalistic malfeasance in the ACORN video hoax.

His website, Big Government, is similarly developing a reputation for running blatantly dishonest commentary, often in the cause of defending the videos and their makers or likewise attacking ACORN. The latest example was pointed out by Matt Tatum at AmSpec and Dave Weigel, who both called out this atrocity from "historian" Michael Zak at Andrew Breitbart's "Big Government" blog:

Democrats used the Klan to suppress their political opposition, with vote fraud and intimidation and violence. Klansmen aimed at African-Americans, nearly all Republicans in those days, and at white Republicans who tried to help them. Once threatened by the KKK, Republicans could in many cases save their lives only by publicly swearing allegiance to the Democratic Party. According to a southern governor, "Few Republicans dare sleep in their houses at night."

"The suppression of enough GOP votes could ensure a Democratic victory," wrote one historian. "There's no question that Klansmen closely watched the polls" - easy to do before the secret ballot was introduced in the United States in the 1880s. All too often, Republican ballots were not even counted.

Like ACORN, the Ku Klux Klan operated with impunity until Republican politicians and journalists sounded an alarm. In 1869, Nathan Bedford Forrest, the KKK's Grand Dragon, ordered the Klan disbanded. Why? The national organization was getting too much attention, so Klansmen would have to soldier on in state-level organizations, such as the Red Shirts in South Carolina and the Men of Justice in Alabama. Nonetheless, most members of these spin-off groups considered themselves to be Klansmen.

Good God. It's hard to know where to begin. Let's try with Weigel's observation:

The fact that the KKK suppressed and terrorized black voters while ACORN, well, doesn’t — sort of left out here.

More to the point, the entire raison d'etre of the Klan was to disenfranchise black voters, to terrorize them into submission and to ensure that they could not participate as full citizens. According to historians, they killed an estimated 20,000 people in the years 1866-1870 alone (see Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, p. 49). Indeed, the Klansmen of the postwar period essentially negated the war's outcome by destroying Reconstruction through a campaign of terrorist violence that encompassed massacres, white citizen militias destroying black townships, and the complete destruction of the voting franchise for black people, thereby ensuring white rule for the next century and beyond. (For more on this, be sure to read Stephen Budiansky's riveting account, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War, which was excerpted in the New York Times.)

ACORN's very raison d'etre, in blazing contradistinction from the KKK, is to enfranchise minority voters and bring them into the American democratic system. That is to say, its very existence is about repairing the damage created by the Klan and its legacy of Jim Crow and segregation -- damage that remains with us to this day. Moreover, its established means of doing so are peaceful and democratic: voter-enrollment drives and education work, empowering minority communities to achieve economic and politic equity. That was what the Klan was devoted to preventing.

Continue reading »

The only thing more discouraging than Teh Surge 2.0 is the finding that our defense contracting is still as screwed up as ever. In eight years, given all the money pouring into Iraq and the knowledge that it was not well overseen, the US government now repeating the same mistakes in Afghanistan.

In the report released Friday, auditors with the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction blamed poor communication between U.S. officials and the two companies that are working on the majority of the projects.

While the U.S. Agency for International Development has relied on the companies, Louis Berger and Black & Veatch, for updates on projects, "that reporting has not always been timely or sufficient," the auditors said.

The companies also had trouble meeting deadlines for projects because of dangerous conditions.

In addition, Afghanistan began rebuilding its electrical grid without a concrete plan for how to approach such a complex effort, the auditors said.

In 2006, the USAID awarded the two U.S. companies a five-year, $1.4 billion joint contract to build many of the roads and energy projects that now are under way in Afghanistan.

Our government's defense accounting process is amazingly broken. Each service has its own accounting rules and procedures, and the auditing process isn't too effective. SecDef Gates is trying to improve the process, but it's like using band-aids to patch a dam that's leaking in multiple spots. We can't spend money on health or education, but there's no bottom to the defense bowl. Oh and Congress is completely unwilling to do anything about it, as long as the Repubs can throw up cuts in Medicare and Social Security instead.

Maybe President Obama can get around to this issue in his second term. No way he's going to touch it in the first term.

There's little doubt that General David Petraeus is a smart cookie whatever you think about his political loyalties, and quite a few people I respect highly as foreign policy reporters and analysts have good opinions of his military abilities. But when did a four star general get handed the authority to act as if he were Secretary of State?

The WaPo reports that:

Gen. David H. Petraeus has launched a major reassessment of U.S. strategy for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and the surrounding region, while warning that the lack of development and the spiraling violence in Afghanistan will probably make it "the longest campaign of the long war."

The 100-day assessment will result in a new campaign plan for the Middle East and Central Asia, a region in which Petraeus will oversee the operations of more than 200,000 American troops as the new head of U.S. Central Command, beginning Oct. 31.

The review will formally begin next month, but experts and military officials involved said Petraeus is already focused on at least two major themes: government-led reconciliation of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the leveraging of diplomatic and economic initiatives with nearby countries that are influential in the war. [Emphasis Mine - C]

All of this seems like a good idea to me. But, crucially, neither of those themes are military ones and the military shouldn't be leading the way on them. It's about seperation of power and having the military subordinate to civilian policymakers rather than the other way around.

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USA Today:

The Bush administration announced a new tool Tuesday to freeze financial assets of those who want to destabilize Iraq.

President Bush unveiled a new executive order that allows the administration to block bank accounts and any other financial assets that might be found in this country belonging to people, companies or groups that the United States deems are working to threaten stability in Iraq.

Bush cited the "unusual and extraordinary threat" to national security and foreign policy of the United States "posed by acts of violence threatening the peace and stability of Iraq and undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq and to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people."

No person, company or group was designated under the order on Tuesday.

The order seeks to fill a gap in U.S. authority to use financial sanctions to go after such offenders.

Oh boy, there's a whole bunch of red flags on this one. Bank accounts IN THIS COUNTRY that are deemed to threaten the peace and stability of Iraq? What peace and stability? How many ways can you see this being abused?

The Reaction: The U.S. government -- with the knowledge and inaction of the Bush Administration, which covered it up -- denied Katrina victims massive amounts of foreign aid and support at the same time they were wasting billions on now crumbling reconstruction projects in Iraq

The Old Hippie's Groovy Blog: Oceans of abundance?

The Largest Minority: It is worth noting that Dennis Kucinich is considered crazy by the mainstream media. That indicates that he's a rational man who says what he actually believes

The Newshoggers: A useful roundup of their own...

Bob Geiger: Best of the week's editorial cartoons

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: jspot, Intrepid Liberal Journal, Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, Reality Check

(Guest blogged by Logan Murphy)

Michael Collins of "The Scoop" brings us great news out of Florida.

Florida Plan Gives Citizens Real Paper Ballots

North Florida. Retired Navy aviator and veteran, Bill Faulkner, MBA, may have done the impossible. He devised a plan to return believable elections to Florida by turning optical scan forms into the ballot of record, to be counted by citizens in public areas where all can view the process taking place. This radical departure from the maze of today's computerized voting harkens back to over 100 years of U.S elections history.

Florida Gov. Crist Makes History

This is one of the most revolutionary and far reaching proposals made by a governor in years. The removal of voting rights for ex-felons, those who have served their time and returned to society, is a direct descendent of the 1890 Mississippi Constitution. This document proudly listed a variety of ways Post Reconstruction whites would remove all political power form black citizens.