No, really. Remember, as Steve Gilliard says, the republicans and the 1600 Crew love our troops ... us Democrats we hate'em according to the hyper-traitorous wingnuts.

A local family said fallen soldiers and Marines deserve better and that one would think our war heroes are being transported with dignity, care and respect. It said one would think upon arrival in their hometowns they are greeted with honor. But unfortunately, the family said that is just not the case.

Dead heroes are supposed to come home with their coffins draped with the American flag -- greeted by a color guard.

But in reality, many are arriving as freight on commercial airliners -- stuffed in the belly of a plane with suitcases and other cargo.

John Holley and his wife, Stacey, were stunned when they found out the body of their only child, Matthew, who died in Iraq last month, would be arriving at Lindbergh Field as freight.
...
The bodies of dead service members arrive at Dover Air Force Base.

From that point, they are sent to their families on commercial airliners.

Reporters from 10News called the Defense Department for an explanation. A representative said she did not know why this is happening.

Given the numbers of middle-aged men and women whose exposure to the military has been Gomer Pyle, Rambo and all the Chuck Norris war movies, I doubt that many would be saavy enough to know the difference. They probably get a letter or telegram notifying them of the shipment, and instructions for to have their funeral home pick up the remains from the airline cargo office.

You have to wonder what's happened to the whole Casualty Assistance Calls Officer program, that used to be sort of the province of local reserve units (now probably in Mess O'Potamia), and local active duty folks (if any). I'm sure that Dancing Donnie has found some local CheneyBurton affiliate to outsource it to, on no-bid basis of course, and they don't work evenings or weekends.

I'm sure that the 1600 Crew is not too interested in the process, because once they're in "transfer tubes" they can't stand behind Beloved Leader for a political speech on base anymore.

Republicans ... loving some service people, as long as there's no actual time, money or inconvenience involved.

crossposted at Main and Central

Reddhead over at Firedoglake has this story from (of all places) Fox News about an issue that has bothered me quite a bit...i.e. Bunnypants making openly partisan political speeches and attacks in front of uniformed service people. After all, DoD regs forbid in no uncertain terms going to a purely politcal event in uniform...seems it's bothering more than a few other folks who are thinking about it too...

Questions have been raised about the military's attendance at events where Bush says something like "they spoke the truth then, they're speaking politics now." Several members of the military told FOX News that Bush is inviting the troops to take sides in a partisan debate in his speeches.

"This is a very bad sign," said retired Marine Gen. Joseph Hoar, who led Central Command in the early 1990s and is an administration critic. "This is the sort of thing that you find in other countries where the military and political, certain political parties are aligned."

"They're the ones who are defending our freedom," said White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett. "They should be able to listen to the debate, they should be able to hear both sides."

Holy Shit...Falafel O'Loofah is gonna spring a leak when he sees this...

Some of the nation's most prominent megachurches have decided not to hold worship services on the Sunday that coincides with Christmas Day, a move that is generating controversy among evangelical Christians at a time when many conservative groups are battling to "put the Christ back in Christmas."
...
...Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., always a pacesetter among megachurches, is handing out a DVD it produced for the occasion that features a heartwarming contemporary Christmas tale.

"What we're encouraging people to do is take that DVD and in the comfort of their living room, with friends and family, pop it into the player and hopefully hear a different and more personal and maybe more intimate Christmas message, that God is with us wherever we are," said Cally Parkinson, communications director at Willow Creek, which draws 20,000 people on a typical Sunday.

Wow...for those members of the 101st Fighting Keyboard Commandos who are in imminent danger of getting kicked out of Mom's basement or cut off from their Cheezey Snax or both, here's a new way to make some quick cash...help others cheat at on-line games. Shoot, they're republicans, so the cheating and corruption gene is there at birth ... moral dilema? No problem. Cheat for profit? Next stop, Congress...

One of China's newest factories operates here in the basement of an old warehouse. Posters of World of Warcraft and Magic Land hang above a corps of young people glued to their computer screens, pounding away at their keyboards in the latest hustle for money.
...
One huge site here in Fuzhou has over 100 computers in a series of large, dark rooms. About 70 players could be seen playing quietly one weekday afternoon, while some players slept by the keyboard.

"We recruit through newspaper ads," said the 30-something owner, whose workers range from 18 to 25 years old. "They all know how to play online games, but they're not willing to do hard labor."

Enuff to make you chortle...Fearless Leader goes to Washington and gives a "speech".

"Only a few hundred members showed up for the hastily organized event at a Washington hotel and empty chairs were removed from the back of the ballroom before Bush arrived. The audience interrupted Bush for applause only once during the speech and even then, many, if not most, did not clap. There was polite applause when he finished."

How long is the mysterious "no-fly" list that the US Government passes on to airlines? Well, according to one source, there are 80,000 names on it, and it's managed by the Department of Homeland Security...home of some of the most incompetant people in Government service today (think: Mike Brown & Co.).

A watchlist of possible terror suspects distributed by the US government to airlines for pre-flight checks is now 80 000 names long, a Swedish newspaper reported on Thursday, citing European air industry sources.

The classified list, which carried just 16 names before the September 11 2001 attacks in New York and Washington had grown to 1 00 by the end of 2001, to 40 000 a year later and now stands at 80 000, Svenska Dagbladet reported.

Some bunch of security-conscious folks running the show, eh? Naaaah, just morons, half-wits and greedheads. And that's just the 1600 Crew...

Gotta wonder how many new-born infants are still on that list...more than one, I'm sure.

Because you can never fuck over our children, our soldiers, and all the future generations of citizens enough, it's time to have another tax-cut.

The House passed three separate tax cuts yesterday and plans to approve a fourth today, trimming the federal revenue by $94.5 billion over five years -- nearly double the budget savings that Republicans muscled through the House last month.

GOP leaders portray the tax bills -- for the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast, affluent investors, U.S. troops serving in Iraq and taxpayers who otherwise would be hit by the alternative minimum tax -- as vital to keeping the economy rolling.

Finally, the House passed a modest, $153 million tax break that would extend a provision allowing members of the military to use their combat pay to claim the earned income credit.

This is for the working poor. You have to have income earning from wages of less than $29,900. This credit was enacted under President Gerald Ford in 1975

Oh,and doing the math, 153 million is something like .16% of the proposed 94.5 Billion dollars being allocated to the wealthiest 1% of Americans, most of whom are probably just thrilled with their votes to destroy the America these soldiers defend with their lives for poverty-level minimum-wages.

Fellow Vet Bulldog has posted an interview with a friend of his who just got back from Mess O'Potamia over at Main and Central. Worth a read if you haven't seen it already.

Well, the conspiracy charges against Delay will not go forward, but the money-laundering charges will...

A judge dismissed the conspiracy charges Monday against Rep. Tom DeLay but refused to throw out the money-laundering counts, dashing the Texas congressman's hopes for now of reclaiming his post as House majority leader.
...
Judge Pat Priest, who is presiding over the case against the Republican, issued the ruling after a hearing late last month in which DeLay's attorney argued that the indictment was fatally flawed.

While this is all well and good, none of this is even related to the activities of Delay's good buddy Jack Abramoff, who is probably just waiting to see how much he can get for ratting out everyone from top to bottom all at once.

Grab some popcorn...the show is just getting underway.

Coming up next, how all those who aren't signed on with the 1600 Crew program are part of "Old Europe".

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice chastised Europe leaders today, saying that before they complain about secret jails for terror suspects in European nations, they should realize that interrogations of these suspects have produced information that helped "save European lives."
...
"We must bring terrorists to justice wherever possible," she said. "But there have been many cases where the local government cannot detain or prosecute a suspect, and traditional extradition is not a good option.

"In those cases," she added, "the local government can make the sovereign choice to cooperate in the transfer of a suspect to a third country, which is known as a rendition.

"Sometimes, these efforts are misunderstood," she said.

She made an effort to frame the debate as one over the effectiveness of terror enforcement and not over the propriety of holding suspects indefinitely in secret prisons.

"We consider the captured members of Al Qaeda and its allies to be unlawful combatants who may be held, in accordance with the law of war, to keep them from killing innocents," she said. "We must bring terrorists to justice wherever possible."

And remember: the 1600 Crew is so honest and forthcoming about everything it's OKeyBeDokey to just "trust them" on this, and all the Terra™ attacks they've prevented, because they were so right about the WMD's in Iraq.

Fuckers.

OK, fuck the political correctness. In our name, our Slightly Retarded Preznit has been allowing, even personally encouraging "renditions" to happen In Our Name. This is horrifying. This is the story of one man who was mistakenly captured by the CIA and had his life destroyed. Apparently our score-keeping Retard-in-Chief has made a few other mistakes.

Coats informed the German minister that the CIA had wrongfully imprisoned one of its citizens, Khaled Masri, for five months, and would soon release him, the sources said. There was also a request: that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public.
...
The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls "erroneous renditions," according to several former and current intelligence officials.

One official said about three dozen names fall in that category; others believe it is fewer. The list includes several people whose identities were offered by al Qaeda figures during CIA interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college professor who had given the al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said.
...
Masri was held for five months largely because the head of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center's al Qaeda unit "believed he was someone else," one former CIA official said. "She didn't really know. She just had a hunch."
...
Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons -- referred to in classified documents as "black sites," which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe.

In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the CTC was the place to be for CIA officers wanting in on the fight. The staff ballooned from 300 to 1,200 nearly overnight.

"It was the Camelot of counterterrorism," a former counterterrorism official said. "We didn't have to mess with others -- and it was fun."

Thousands of tips and allegations about potential threats poured in after the attacks. Stung by the failure to detect the plot, CIA officers passed along every tidbit. The process of vetting and evaluating information suffered greatly, former and current intelligence officials said. "Whatever quality control mechanisms were in play on September 10th were eliminated on September 11th," a former senior intelligence official said.
...
Others criticized Black's CTC for embracing a "Hollywood model" of operations, as one former longtime CIA veteran called it, eschewing the hard work of recruiting agents and penetrating terrorist networks. Instead, the new approach was similar to the flashier paramilitary operations that had worked so well in Afghanistan, and played well at the White House, where the president was keeping a scorecard of captured or killed terrorists.my em

Khaled Masri came to the attention of Macedonian authorities on New Year's Eve 2003. Masri, an unemployed father of five living in Ulm, Germany, said he had gone by bus to Macedonia to blow off steam after a spat with his wife. He was taken off a bus at the Tabanovce border crossing by police because his name was similar to that of an associate of a 9/11 hijacker. The police drove him to Skopje, the capital, and put him in a motel room with darkened windows, he said in a recent telephone interview from Germany.
...
"The Skopje station really wanted a scalp because everyone wanted a part of the game," a CIA officer said. Because the European Division chief at headquarters was also on vacation, the deputy dealt directly with the CTC and the head of its al Qaeda unit.

The director of the al Qaeda unit supported that approach. She insisted he was probably a terrorist, and should be imprisoned and interrogated immediately.

Others were doubtful. They wanted to wait to see whether the passport was proved fraudulent. Beyond that, there was no evidence Masri was not who he claimed to be -- a German citizen of Arab descent traveling after a disagreement with his wife.

The unit's director won the argument. She ordered Masri captured and flown to a CIA prison in Afghanistan.
...
Masri was guarded during the day by Afghans, he said. At night, men who sounded as if they spoke American-accented English showed up for the interrogation. Sometimes a man he believed was a doctor in a mask came to take photos, draw blood and collect a urine sample.

Back at the CTC, Masri's passport was given to the Office of Technical Services to analyze. By March, OTS had concluded the passport was genuine. The CIA had imprisoned the wrong man.

On the day of his release, the prison's director, who Masri believed was an American, told Masri that he had been held because he "had a suspicious name," Masri said in an interview.

Several intelligence and diplomatic officials said Macedonia did not want the CIA to bring Masri back inside the country, so the agency arranged for him to be flown to Albania. Masri said he was taken to a narrow country road at dusk. When they let him off, "They asked me not to look back when I started walking," Masri said. "I was afraid they would shoot me in the back."
...
Masri can find few words to explain his ordeal. "I have very bad feelings" about the United States, he said. "I think it's just like in the Arab countries: arresting people, treating them inhumanly and less than that, and with no rights and no laws."

The normal channels and procedures that the CIA has used for all the years of the Cold War were tossed out the window with the events of 9/11 because the fear-mongering and jingoism ruled the day. The tragic consequences of having a severly brain-damaged retard at the helm of the republic will play out for many more years than need be because of stupid shit like this.

In a world where reality rules, we've always seen the "strength" and "character" of Preznit Damaged Brain are just a sham covering for his intellectual dishonesty, personal cowardice and true lack of character or allegiance to anything other than the trappings of power accorded him by his sycophantic followers and the opportunists interested making money at the expense of our National Pride, Integrity and Security.

IN OUR NAME.

Protect Democracy from the right-wing hacks who want to steal every election for the next millenium. Go sign Rush Holt's petition.

What else do you have to do on a Sunday besides rake leaves and Save the Republic?

1. The 1600 Crew {hearts} Our Troops
   
2. Troubling...
   
3. Gasket blowing time...
   
4. 101st Fighting Keyboarder Gold Mine
   
5. Bunnypants does CFR
   
6. Alrighty, then...
   
7. Screwing our Future to the Wall
   
8. Interview
   
9. Sorry, Tom
   
10. Kinda Sleezy, Kinda Liar, All Condi-scending