GOP Increases Deficit for Wars, Bank Bailouts and
the Wealthy, But Cuts Medicare, Social Security and the Safety Net

ROBERT CREAMER FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

GOP Plans to Demand Mandatory Cuts in Social Security, Medicare as Price for Debt Ceiling

It is increasingly clear that the Republicans will demand mandatory cuts in Social Security and Medicare as a price for increasing the debt ceiling later this spring.

Of course they won't say they are demanding mandatory cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

read more

Read The Full Article:
http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/12664

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Bomb Every Mansion: An Alternative Strategy to
Prevent Safe Havens in Pakistan

I’ve been told that, after nine years, the reason we must continue to spend billions fighting in Afghanistan is to prevent it from again “becoming a safe haven for terrorists.” Alternaely, I’ve also been told we can?t pull out of[...]

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/firedoglake/fdl/~3/9PGBfHL93K4/

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Kent Conrad angers fellow Dems with budget
proposal

Sen. Kent Conrad
It's unfortunate deficit peacock Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) is chair of the Senate Budget Committee, because is definitely much further right than the majority of the caucus, and has no problem attempting to push his will on his colleagues. Witness his budget proposal.

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) has been bargaining for months in secret with Republicans in the so-called Gang of Six to craft a budget that might win bipartisan acceptance. On Tuesday, Conrad abruptly dropped the veil and rolled out his own offering for party colleagues?to brutal reviews.

"He's going to be a man without a country," the Democratic aide said, describing a contentious Tuesday briefing.

The problem for Democrats is that, rather than put down a firm Democratic marker from which the party can negotiate, Conrad has adopted a plan that resembles the work he's done with legislators across the aisle.

In bringing it forward himself, Conrad sets the starting point for the Democratic position in a more conservative spot than President Barack Obama's budget?and that was already a compromise. Obama's plan includes a spending freeze for federal workers, among many other concessions to the GOP.

"He's setting this out like it's the official Democratic position," a Democratic staffer said. "I don't know if this can pass his own committee without major changes."

It's that bipartisan pony, again. "He is hoping to salvage the work of the bipartisan group by attracting a few Republicans to the more conservative plan." While it's getting panned by fellow Democrats, some Republicans are rubbing their hands together with glee at the prospect of a Conrad budget laying down the marker for Senate Dems. "'I can?t imagine that the Conrad budget won?t be somewhat better than the president?s budget?it's got to be,' [Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) told reporters. 'But [Republicans] need to look at it.'"

Conrad based his budget on the catfood commission non-report, the loose set of recommendations deficit commission co-chairs Erskine Bowels and Alan Simpson released when the full commission failed to fulfill its mission. There is one glaring, and thankful, omission, however. Conrad doesn't touch Social Security, which he says is on a separate budgetary track.

But outside of that, prepare for full-on austerity until and unless Senate Democrats get serious and start to work on the one budget that everyone from Paul Krugman to The Economist are calling the most serious and realistic proposal.

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http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/pS4-lihrHr4/-Kent-Conrad-angers-fe
llow-Dems-with-budget-proposal

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A Good Call

President Obama has decided not to release photos of the body of Osama bin Laden.

This is a good decision for many reasons. For one, it would be beneath the dignity of the US to show a photo of a corpse, for another it would undo the gesture of burying bin Laden’s body at sea with respect for Islamic funeral customs.

There are still people who are convinced that the Apollo moon landing in 1969 was a hoax, no photograph will stop conspiracy theories, or persuade those who want to believe them.

The point of the burial at sea was to avoid creating a focal point for bin Laden’s followers. A photo would have served as a virtual shrine to rally around. I’m relieved that our country won’t hand such a propaganda tool over to those who wish us harm.

Read The Full Article:
http://kmareka.com/2011/05/04/a-good-call/

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Targeting War Criminals

Not Bush, not Cheney, but war criminals nonetheless
When someone's small grandchildren are killed in a war it always seems especially tragic. And it happens every single day in every single war. It's horrifying and it's part of what drives me crazy about national leaders almost never facing war crimes tribunals. I was mortified that Qaddafi's 29-year old son Saif al-Arab, a non-combatant, and 3 pre-teen grandsons of Qaddafi's were killed in a NATO air strike aimed at taking out Qaddafi last week. But... better his family than anyone else's in Libya. All my life I've been a tremendous fan of regicide and like an anonymous editorialist in the Guardian this week, if for different reasons, I feel that Qaddafi is indeed a legitimate target. The author, "Alaa al-Ameri" (supposedly "a British-Libyan economist and writer") has a more twisted theory of why than I do.

Gaddafi is not a head of state. He is a warlord in control of a personal army that he has tasked with the mass killing and terrorising of Libyans for the crime of wishing to live as free human beings. There is no meaningful Libyan government structure or decision-making body besides Gaddafi himself and his sons.

Which logic or legal principle underlies the notion that while militia in the act of aggression against a civilian population may be attacked, the leader of that militia-- actively engaged in directing the violence-- is off limits? What claim to special rights and privileges can be made by a man who uses rape as a weapon of war? Which principle of international law would be eroded by his death?

...If Gaddafi has lost family members due to Nato bombing, there is only one man to blame ? Gaddafi. He funds, arms and directs the horrific violence that his forces have inflicted on the Libyan people simply for desiring to be free. He could stop the violence today but chooses not to. Instead he uses even the death of his son as a tool to serve his own political interests.

Sounds like the "British-Libyan economist and writer" is penning some propaganda for David Cameron's government. I doubt Cameron would approve of my rationale for why Qaddafi is a legitimate target. All aggressive war makers should be, especially heads of countries. Let's try it out for 5 or 6 decades and see if it tamps down violence. Really... what do we have to lose?

Last week we took a look at Lu Chuan's soon-to-be-released (in the U.S.) film City Of Life And Death, about the massacre in/of Nanking by Japanese invaders in 1937. Bad enough that something like 50,000 women were systematically raped by Japanese soldiers-- some estimates say it was closer to 100,000-- but as many as 300,000 men, women and children were butchered, some for sport. Much like George W. Bush did at the onset of the unprovoked aggression against Iraq, "Emperor" Hirohito announced that the Imperial Army was not subject to war crimes laws. Although that didn't stand up after Japan was defeated, Hirohito was never brought to justice. And neither was the mastermind of one of the greatest war crimes in history, Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, who issued the order to kill all captives. In fact, Asaka was granted immunity by the victorious Americans because of his status as a member of the royal family (who the Americans hoped to use as conservative bulwarks against godless Communism).

This week, no one-- at least no one in the West-- is claiming Osama bin-Laden was due any kind of immunity from cold-blooded execution. He was not firing at the soldiers who entered his home on a kill mission" and he was killed, quite deliberately, while unarmed. I would have preferred a trial but I'm a huge advocate of the death penalty-- especially for war criminals.

Meanwhile, bin-Laden's senior commanders are said to be on the run in Pakistan. Is the ISI trying to shield them or some of them? Or will some be sacrificed to save the Pakistanis further embarrassment? There are at least a dozen senior al-Qaeda leaders the U.S. would like to dump into the sea next to bin-Laden.

1. Ayman al-Zawahri. Egyptian. Age 59-- Osama bin Laden's deputy and current operational commander of al-Qaeda, according to the United States State department. Went into hiding with Bin Laden during the US invasion of Afghanistan and managed to survive a US air strike that targeted him in a Pakistani tribal region in January 2006. There is a $25 million reward on his head.

2. Saif al-Adel. Egyptian. Age around 50-- Thought to be a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda, even perhaps the organisation's military chief. He was thought to be in prison in Iran, but has now almost certainly been released and has returned to North Waziristan in Pakistan. There is a $5 million reward on his head.

3. Sulaiman Abu Ghaith. Kuwaiti. Age 45-- Al-Qaida spokesman and radical preacher. Detained in Iran in 2003 but released and allowed to leave the country in 2010, according to Kuwait media. Suspected of having rejoined Bin Laden in Pakistan and is still at large.

4. Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah. Egyptian. Age late 40s--- Wanted for the 1998 series of bombings on US embassies in East Africa. Member of al-Qaeda's top council. According to US intelligence he fled Nairobi in 1998 and went to Pakistan, where he may remain at large. He may also be in Iran.

5. Adnan al-Shukri Juma. Saudi. 35-- A younger member of al-Qaeda, Shukri Juma may have risen up the ranks because of the loss of more senior members. He spent time living in the US and may have been behind a failed attempt on the New York subway system. He may be in charge of operations for North America and is thought to be in Waziristan.

6. Rashid Rauf. Dual British Pakistani citizenship. Age around 34-- Rauf is suspected of involvement in the failed attempt in 2006 to blow up aircraft leaving from London Heathrow with liquid explosives. He escaped from Pakistani custody in December 2007 and was reportedly killed by a US drone attack in Pakistan in November 2008. But his family have denied his death and some sources believe he remains at large.

7. Ilyas Kashmiri. Pakistani. Age 47-- Kashmiri is one of the most important figures rising up al-Qaeda's ranks. A one-eyed, red-bearded guerrilla warfare expert, he is thought to have masterminded some of the deadliest attacks in India and Pakistan. He is also the commander of Brigade 313, a unit that is sometimes described as al-Qaeda's Pakistani arm, sometimes as a special combat task force, and sometimes as an independent jihadi unit.

8. Hakimullah Mehsud. Pakistani. Age 32-- Hakimullah Mehsud is the leader of the Tehrik-I-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) movement, which has been described as having a symbiotic relationship with al-Qaeda by the US.

"TTP draws ideological guidance from al-Qaeda while al-Qaeda relies on the TTP for safe haven in the Pashtun areas along the Afghan-Pakistani border," said Daniel Benjamin, a US counterterrorism chief. An aggressive field commander, Mehsud was thought to be killed by a drone attack in January 2010, but subsequent videos proved he survived the attack.

9. Ghulam Mustafa. Pakistani. 40-- Very little has been reported of Mustafa since he was released by Pakistan in 2006. Before then he was thought to be al-Qaeda's chief in Pakistan. However, he was never formally charged or handed over to the US and has quietly disappeared from view. He may have left al-Qaeda, tainted by suspicion of co-operation with Pakistani intelligence.

10. Abu Yahya al-Libi. Libyan. Age 47-- A high-ranking member of al-Qaeda, Libi escaped from an American prison in Afghanistan and is thought to have subsequently survived a US drone strike in Pakistan in 2009. He is considered to be "the scholar" of al-Qaeda and often takes on the role of a preacher. He has released a number of videotaped sermons.

11. Anas al-Liby (also known as Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Raghie), Libyan. Age late 40s-- Charged by the US with involvement in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Has a $5 million reward on his head. Has worked as a computer specialist for al-Qaeda.

12. Qari Saifullah Akhtar. Nationality and age unknown--- the leader of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI, or the Movement of Islamic Holy War), is an alleged member of al-Qaeda who was released by Pakistan from custody last December. He was reported to have trained 3,500 operatives in Afghanistan shortly before the US invasion.

Read The Full Article:
http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2011/05/targeting-war-criminals.html

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GOP Presidential Candidate Gov. Roemer Slams
Lobbyists As ‘What’s Wrong With The America System’

As candidates begin to campaign for the 2012 Republican primary for president, media attention has centered on establishment favorites like former Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) and former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MN), as well as conspiracy-minded Obama-bashers like Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Donald Trump. However, there is a candidate who has distinguished himself not by promoting vicious smears, but by actually proposing fundamental reforms. Former Gov. Buddy Roemer (R-LA) is running in the Republican primary with a promise to clean the influence of big money out of government.

Roemer, who is leading by example by accepting a maximum of $100 dollars in disclosed contributions, was at a Tea Party rally in New Hampshire earlier this month. We spoke to Roemer about his platform. He had tough words for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other corporate lobbyists responsible for killing The DISCLOSE Act, a legislative fix to allow transparency in federal elections. “It’s disastrous, its dysfunctional, to their shame,” Roemer said. The phenomenon of big corporations using their influence to skirt paying any taxes at all, like GE, is “what’s wrong with America,” Roemer explained:

ROEMER: Right now, too often the political debate has become about the money and not about the issues. And those who have the money have a vested interest in the results and you never know who they are. [...] I have full disclosure and I challenge my opponents to do the same. [...]

FANG: You’re running in the Republican primary. And some of the biggest players in the Republican Party are groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the NFIB, these big money, big corporate groups that are the reason the DISCLOSE Act died. They lobbied both Democrats and Republicans to kill the bill in the Senate.

ROEMER: It’s disastrous, its dysfunctional, to their shame. You might look at the big unions on the Democratic side. The guys with the bucks want unfettered regulation. They want to run America. [...] The reason the tax code is four thousand pages long and paid no taxes last year and made five billion dollars? It’s [campaign] checks. That’s whats wrong with the American system. It’s not free anymore. It’s bought. [...]

FANG: How are you going to directly challenge them? I mean, you’ve placed limits on yourself, but what are you going to do about Karl Rove’s groups?

ROEMER: Well, Karl Rove can contribute to me. One hundred dollars!

FANG: But he’s got these front groups with undisclosed money.

ROEMER: I understand. You know I’ve got to run against the system. It’s corrupt. And the only way I know how to do it — and if you have a better idea, give it to me Lee — is by example. I’m going to show that a grassroots campaign can capture New Hampshire, South Carolina. I’m going to whip ‘em, on my own terms.

Watch it:

Roemer’s sharp criticism against corporate front groups, particularly the U.S. Chamber and Karl Rove’s network, is startling. Most Republican candidates, even some Democrats, cower before powerful big business lobbyists. For instance, I spoke to Pawlenty in March of last year about a story I wrote around that time concerning the fact that bailed out banks were funneling money to the Chamber to kill regulations on Wall Street. Pawlenty had no problem with taxpayer being money used to lobby the government. In fact, he later told me he had no problem with big banks paying nothing in taxes either.

Roemer has been disqualified from participating in tomorrow night’s GOP presidential debate in South Carolina.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/05/04/buddy-roemer-karl-rove/

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Is Kent Conrad a man without a country

Senator Kent Conrad is a member of the hideous Gang of Six that Dick Durbin is so willingly fronting, and it appears that his new budget is so bad that a mutiny is a brewing. You know how I dislike ConservaDems being in a position to cut their way out of a deficit. It's impossible, it's destructive to the American worker, and it's failing around the world. Yet for Conrad, austerity rules.

Ryan Grimm:

Senate Democrats are furious at their lead budget negotiator for crafting a blueprint that they think moves the party too far to the right, a senior Democratic aide said.

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) has been bargaining for months in secret with Republicans in the so-called Gang of Six to craft a budget that might win bipartisan acceptance. On Tuesday, Conrad abruptly dropped the veil and rolled out his own offering for party colleagues -- to brutal reviews.

"He's going to be a man without a country," the Democratic aide said, describing a contentious Tuesday briefing.

The problem for Democrats is that, rather than put down a firm Democratic marker from which the party can negotiate, Conrad has adopted a plan that resembles the work he's done with legislators across the aisle.

In bringing it forward himself, Conrad sets the starting point for the Democratic position in a more conservative spot than President Barack Obama's budget -- and that was already a compromise. Obama's plan includes a spending freeze for federal workers, among many other concessions to the GOP.

"He's setting this out like it's the official Democratic position," a Democratic staffer said. "I don't know if this can pass his own committee without major changes."

Democrats think Conrad decided release his budget before the Gang of Six because the talks were collapsing. He is hoping to salvage the work of the bipartisan group by attracting a few Republicans to the more conservative plan...read on

Since Conrad was given such a lofty position as being part of the infamous Gang of Six, I wonder why the outrage from Democratic Senators? Did they think he would do anything less egregious?

Read The Full Article:
http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/kent-conrad-man-without-country

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Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

Our regular featured content-On This Day In History May 4 by TheMomCatPunting the Pundits by TheMomCatEvening Edition by ek hornbeckWednesday is mishima's well deserved day of rest.these featured articles-Perspective and a New Face by TheMomCatKeep Your[...]

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w-gazette

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Weekly Pulse: Arrests over the Ryan Plan, and the
GOPs Kinder, Gentler Medicaid Cuts

  By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger This week marks the final edition of the Weekly Pulse. I have been writing the newsletter since 2008 and it has certainly been an exciting time to be covering health care in the United[...]

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ryan-plan-and-the-gops-kinder-gentler-medicaid-cuts-2

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Osama bin Laden assassination turns conservatives
into dirty hippies

The new symbol of the Republican Party?
 
 

Who knew conservatives were, at heart, a bunch of dirty fucking hippies?

That's the new meme coming from the right. Fox's Shep Smith wants to know if "anyone talking about the fact that this is illegal, this operation was illegal, or is that a matter that's going to be left for another day?"

And on his Fox show Freedom Watch, Andrew Napolitano declared that the assassination is dangerous and unlawful:

This business of the president deciding to kill people is very dangerous and very unlawful. Put aside that governmental assassination is a violation of the Constitution. Put aside that this killing was not in self-defense and was without a declaration of war. Put aside the law that the president may never order the killing of civilians?period. And put aside that governmental killing violates at least four treaties and three federal statutes.

Right. So now the Constitution and various treaties are of utmost importance. Back in the Bush years, they were, according to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, "quaint" and "obsolete."

And back then, conservatives weren't clutching their pearls about Bush's "dead or alive" mandate:  

On Sept. 17, after Bush remarked that bin Laden is "wanted dead or alive," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Executive Order 12333, signed Dec. 4, 1981, by President Ronald Reagan, remains in effect. Like its counterparts under Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, Executive Orders 11905 and 12306, the directive forbids assassination but does not define the term. Fleischer declined four times to interpret the text. "I'm going to just repeat my words and others will figure out the exact implications of them, but it does not inhibit the nation's ability to act in self-defense," he said.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, speaking Oct. 15, went slightly further.
"It is certainly within the president's power to direct that, in our self-defense, we take this battle to the terrorists and that means to the leadership and command and control capabilities of terrorist networks," he said.

And remember when Karl Rove explained the difference between conservatives and liberals?

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9-11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9-11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.

But since it was President Obama who succeeded where Bush failed, now conservatives are oh-so-concerned about the legality of killing the world's number one evil doer.

Heck, even the Dalai Lama thinks the killing of OBL was justified. And he doesn't even believe in killing mosquitoes!

Congratulations, conservatives. Your single-minded, obsessive devotion to criticizing Obama, even when he does exactly what you've wanted for the past decade, has now put you to the left of the Dalai Lama.

Guess we'll see you at the next peace march.

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/F3K6o1Sca9M/-Osama-bin-Laden-assas
sination-turns-conservatives-into-dirty-hippies

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