Archive for the The Middle East category
August 7th, 2006
Aug. 4 - BCN - Members of an Iranian university’s international alumni association are expressing frustration that more than 100 visa holders traveling to the United States to attend the group’s fourth reunion in Santa Clara have had their visas revoked.
Elahe Enssani, a spokeswoman for the Sharif University of Technology Alumni Association conference, which began today at the Santa Clara Hyatt Regency, said all 12 of the conference registrants who were arriving at San Francisco International Airport were denied entry and that only 15 of 105 visa applicants who had hoped
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Tags: Iran, Sharif University of Technology Alumni Association
August 4th, 2006
- Tin Foil Hats And Tiaras For Everyone! — The (liberal)Girl Next Door talks about the recent poll revealing that 1/3rd of Americans believe that 9/11 was “an inside job” and what that staggering fact could or should mean for our future as a country.
One out of three people think the Bush administration could very well have organized the deaths of 3,000 innocent Americans for the sole purpose of furthering their foreign policy objectives. In other words, a third of this country’s citizens believe that the Bush administration is a terrorist organization. How is it possible that impeachment isn’t even on the table if that many Americans think he’s a killer? Yes, it’s a rhetorical question and we can all say in unison, “it’s possible with the help of a lapdog press.”
- Internet “Conspiracies” — In contrast Red Bull uses the same poll to champion Net Neutrality. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Conspiracy Theories, 9/11, net neutrality, gay hate crimes, Homeland Security, FAS, disaster preparedness, Israel, U.S., Hezbollah, Lebanon, Middle East, Military Families Speak Out
August 1st, 2006
- An Epidemic of Hatred — Shakespeare’s Sister has written an excellent must-read piece on the lack of media attention on the war against homosexuality in America.
Consider for a moment the stories you see on the nightly news. Try to recall the scare stories that are built up around two children nationwide getting injured by a faulty toy, or three people nationwide having died from side effects of a medication, or ten people in your city having been attacked by pit bulls over the last twenty years. “A rash of incidents.” “An epidemic.” “What can
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Tags: Israel, Lebanon, Mel Gibson, Bill Cosby, Palestinians, Jew, Arab, Nazis, Iraq, George W. Bush, politics, Fox News, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda
July 31st, 2006
Today is Day 20 of the “Crisis in the Middle East”.
Do you know how many days it’s been since the U.S. invaded Iraq?
According to Frank Rich in yesterday’s New York Times, yesterday was Day 1,229, making today a nice even 1,230.
According to CNN, “there have been 2,802 coalition deaths, 2,576 Americans, two Australians, 114 Britons, 13 Bulgarians, three Danes, two Dutch, two Estonians, one Fijian, one Hungarian, 31 Italians, one Kazakh, one Latvian, 17 Poles, two Romanians, two Salvadoran, three Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and 18 Ukrainians in the war in Iraq as of July 31, 2006.” Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Baghdad, American soldiers, New York Times, ABC, Fox News, NBC, Nouri al-Maliki, Frank Rich
July 28th, 2006
Secretary of State Condi Rice’s prediction of a “New Middle East” may have been dead on, but I don’t think what’s happening over there now is what the White House and Israel had in mind. As a result of the US’s refusal to publically support any call for any sort of cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah and in fact, the US’s apparently brazen and seemingly hypocritical encouragement of Israel to bomb the hell out of a weaker country on the very verge of the kind of democracy the US supposedly promotes, the U.S. and Israel may have finally done
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Tags: Israel, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Egypt, Arab governments, Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Sunnis, President Hosni Mubarak, Iran, al-Qaeda, al-Zawahiri, Palestine, Condi Rice, Shiiti, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, King Abdullah II of Jordan
July 28th, 2006
Georgia Stillwell is a member of Military Families Speak Out and the mother of a soldier serving in Iraq. She’s active in organizations working for peace and to bring her son and our military home from Iraq.
Below is are her amazing thoughts as presented on Stories in America: (emphasis mine)
Distracted, damn right I am!
When I returned home from my trip to Washington DC. Where I met with various Senators, Representatives and the Speaker of the House as part of Military Families Speak Out Operation House Call, I received a
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Tags: American soldiers, Iraq, Military Families Speak Out, Georgia Stillwell, Gold Star Mothers, politics
July 26th, 2006
- The Godless West — The (liberal)Girl Next Door has a post about the religious breakdown of the U.S. based on a map that appeared in USA Today. It’s kind of a surprise actually.
It’s interesting to see the geographical differences, Lutherans in the North, Baptists in the South, Catholics in the Northeast and a bunch of non-religious folks out West. What I found most interesting though is that no-religion places in the top three in just about every state while Evangelicals, if they rank at all, top out at 2%. How is it that such a small minority has so much influence on our government?
- It’s Official, We’re All Living in A Kafka Novel — The All Spin Zone points to an article that originally appeared on The Denver Channel about how Air Marshalls have quotas to make and they’ve been adding people to watch lists for doing things like taking photos on airplanes. You can also read about it at Pam’s House Blend. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: politics, Air Marshals, religion, American Bar Association, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon
July 23rd, 2006
When you’re hearing and reading about the dead Lebanonese civilians, remember than your tax dollars helped to pay for their deaths even though it’s not our soldiers pulling the trigger. Keep that in mind when you hear about the trapped and dead Americans caught in the conflict too.
July 21st, 2006
Lenin’s Tomb has a link to a video clip of a bomb going off in Beirut. With macabre humor, the post is titled “someone just killed the neighbors”. While somewhat jarring, this title is actually very insightful: war generally is not something that happens on some sterilized battlefield away from innocent children and bystanders; rather it’s something that happens on the way to the market and in people’s kitchens. [“Regarding Our Dead Neighbors” (Swerve Left)]
This is what I’ve been talking about for years. We Americans don’t seem to truly grasp that those are actual people dying. I guess because it’s over there. The Middle East is like some twisted evil NeverNeverLand where we send our little boys and they come back in boxes and never grow up, but there aren’t real live people over there. When the news reports bombings and attacks and more dead in the Middle East every day, I just don’t think Americans realize those are real people dying. To us, they’re just numbers, statistics, faceless unknown movie extras.
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Tags: Israel, Pat Buchanan, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Middle East, Lebanon
July 19th, 2006
I’m not a big fan of Secretary of State Condi Rice. That’s no secret. However, I do give props when they are deserved and I must say that I was quite stunned when I read this morning that she had made the decision to waive the transportation fee to Americans evacuating from Lebanon. Kudos to her!
I will add a comment that a number of bloggers were blaming the Republicans solely for the transportation fee in the first place, but a little research does reveal that while “un-fucking-believable,” it is apparently a leftover U.S. policy from a
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Tags: Lebanon, U.S. Embassy, CNN, Condi Rice
July 19th, 2006
Remember when Right-wingers used to make the argument that the war was justifiable because of all of those people Saddam had killed? Remember how the death toll under all of those years under Saddam was much worse than anything we could do?
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — More than 14,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq in the first half of this year, an ominous figure reflecting the fact that “killings, kidnappings and torture remain widespread” in the war-torn country, a United Nations report says.
Killings of civilians are on “an upward trend,” with more than 5,800 deaths and more than 5,700
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Tags: Iraq, Saddam Hussein, death toll
July 17th, 2006
Un-fucking-believable!
The Department of State reminds American citizens that the U.S. government does not provide no-cost transportation but does have the authority to provide repatriation loans to those in financial need. For the portion of your trip directly handled by the U.S. Government we will ask you to sign a promissory note and we will bill you at a later date. In a subsequent message, when we have specific details about the transporation arrangments, we will inform you about the costs you will incur. We will also work with commercial aircraft to ensure that they have adequate flights to help you
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Tags: Lebanon, Israel, U.S. Embassy, Beirut
June 16th, 2006
Here are a few posts written elsewhere that I thought worth passing on:
- Cat and Mouse with the VA (Score One for the Cat) — Dark Wraith is one of those Veterans who received a letter from the Veterans Administration about last month’s Fubar with the laptop and all of that personal data that might or might not have gotten hijacked. He’s not just upset about the Fubar; he’s upset that that they were able to find him at all after he spent ages carefully not alerting them to address changes…
This is Exhibit Number One of what happens when the government turns into a nosy weirdo: its minions collect all kinds of personal data for whatever compelling reason they’ve concocted to make their jobs have meaning, and once they’ve got all that data, they place everyone in the database at risk, both from their own nefarious people and from those who would be able to compromise whatever security they have on the data. They take what isn’t theirs—our privacy—and they can’t have the decency to ensure even that they’re the only ones who can mess up our lives with what they’ve expropriated.
To the Veterans Administration—and knowing full well that my rage will do no good whatsoever—I say this: Stay the Hell out of my life.
To everyone else, I say this: if you’re not afraid of this government, you should be; and if you are afraid of this government, you should be more so.
Not that it will do you any good to be afraid. As far as I can tell, they’ll find you when they want to, anyway. It’s all part of the price we now pay for the security our government provides as it diligently dismisses any regard whatsoever for the right we thought we had to be left alone.
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Tags: Veterans Administration, Identity Theft, Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, insurgents, American soldiers, amnesty, Florida, voter fraud, Voting Irregularities, Greg Palast, sexual harrassment, inhumanity, humanity
June 16th, 2006
“I can’t help but feel through eyes of a combat-wounded Marine in Vietnam, if someone was shot, you tried to save his life. . . . While you were in combat, you had a sense of urgency to end the slaughter, and around here we don’t have that sense of urgency…To me, the administration does not act like there’s a war going on. The Congress certainly doesn’t act like there’s a war going on. If you’re raising money to keep the majority, if you’re thinking about gay marriage, if you’re doing all this other peripheral stuff, what does that say
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Tags: Quote of the Day, Wayne Gilchrest
May 31st, 2006
Every day we here in America are bombarded with the news that more Iraqis and Americans have been killed. Usually we’re just given a number, a total dead for the day.
37. 12. 53.
If one of the American soldiers happened to be local, in a few days, we might hear his or her name on the radio and television as well as the unit he or she served in.
But over here, we never hear the names of the Iraqis.
I kind of get the feeling that for the most part, Americans don’t really get that the Iraqis are actual
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Tags: blogs, Iraq
May 2nd, 2006
Maybe the reason that Americans think we’re so superior is because we don’t take time to realize we’re not actually alone and that there are actually whole other countries and cultures beyond our borders. Then again, we aren’t all that good with figuring out what’s in our own borders, are we? I recall my mother telling me that some friends of hers were on one of those game shows like The Price Is Right and it took them a year to get their prizes shipped to them because they lived in New Mexico and the show wouldn’t ship
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Tags: Iraq, education, Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, Gulf Coast, National Geographics, CNN
April 26th, 2006
I learned today that one of the people I work with, not a co-worker, but a user/cliet, has been “tapped” by the Reserves to go to Iraq. She didn’t seem particularly excited about it and “congrats!” really didn’t fit. I’m really not sure what to say to someone up close and personal when they tell you they’re going to war. She’s not a relative or a close friend; otherwise, it would have been easy as I would have been bawling and hugging her and praying to God for her safety, which is really what I wanted to
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Tags: Iraq, National Guard
April 24th, 2006
I watched 60 Minutes last night and I’ve been reading all of the related articles on Yahoo!News, The Washington Post, CNN, and Reuters. O.K. It’s all the same article. They all say the same thing. And really for those of us liberals who’ve been paying attention since 2002, it’s nothing new. In fact, there wasn’t anything in that report I hadn’t heard before, so it’s hard to get excited.
And I know none of the conservative right-wingers were paying attention anyway so it was just preaching to the choir.
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Tags: WMD, Tyler Drumheller, Fox News, Yahoo!News, Washington Post, CNN, Reuters, White House, CIA, Intelligence, Iraq, 60 Minutes
