Fourteen from Springs to Crawford

We won't back down. Gazette has the report. I'm quoting most of it, as their links are weird sometimes - thanks to the Gazette for their fair story:

By ANDREA BROWN THE GAZETTE

A hospital chaplain, an Iraq war veteran, a registered Republican and an 80-year-old granny are among the 14 Colorado Springs activists heading to “Camp Casey” in Crawford, Texas.

“We are leaving Sunday morning, and we still have room,” organizer Dave Therault said at a news conference Thursday of the caravan to support Cindy Sheehan in the final days of her protest camping outside President Bush’s ranch.

Bush, who’s been vacationing at the ranch, has not spoken with Sheehan, whose son died while serving in Iraq.

Her vigil has attracted swarms of war protesters — and supporters — since she went to Texas earlier this month to confront Bush.

About 40 people gathered Thursday in front of Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission to sign the “Colorado Springs Supports Camp Casey” banner that protesters will take to Crawford, along with tents to camp in the Sheehan compound.

The trip is not affiliated with any group, said Therault, a blues musician who put down his harmonica to organize the anti-war motorcade.

...snip...

Colorado Springs resident Kelly Dougherty, 27, said she joined the National Guard out of patriotism — the same reason she said she’s going to Crawford.

“It’s not just intellectuals and crazy liberals who are against this war,” she said. “The people who are most affected are the veterans and the military families.”

Dougherty helped start Iraq Veterans Against the War after returning from Iraq a year ago.

“When I first started speaking out against the war I was worried there would be a lot of hostility, especially among veterans. What I found was there was overwhelming support,” she said.

Copyright 2005, The Gazette, a division of Freedom Colorado Information. All rights reserved.

More at The Gazette.

Attack Dogs of the Right

Yes, they keep calling her a traitor, a tragedy slut, an ignorant cow, and say she doesn't want us to win in Iraq (whatever that may be in today's White House talking points.) They even claim to know what her son would think about her actions.

This is what they call the woman who raised an honor student, an Eagle Scout, an alter boy, and a Marine.

They will never quit smearing her, just look at how they still treat Jane Fonda after her honest-to-God heartfelt apologies and admissions for her actions during the Vietnam war. Jane Fonda realized her mistakes, but her goal was simple, to save American lives. Cindy's goal is the same, and no amount of smears can break her spirit -- she hit bottom when Casey was killed.

But for his part, George Bush has never made a mistake. He's never made an apology. And he'll never call off the attack dogs of the right as long as he and Karl figure they can rip at the flesh of truth.

Cindy won't back down, no matter how vicious the attacks, and the bravery of this one woman is what may turn the tide in the wave of lies the White House is riding.

(Sorry for the bad analogies, I was on a roll, and the mustard came off the hot dog - Z)

Veterans Wear BS-Protector Ear Guards in Salt Lake City

There's a beautiful picture of a 73-year-old veteran at the Salt Lake meeting wearing "Bullshit Protector" ear flaps during Pres. Bush's 9-11, WW II, 9-11, Iraq, "heroes of our nation's history"(see Ecclesiasticus 44:1) speech. It's at CapitolHillBlue.com, on both the main page and the story link I give here.

There's a more disturbing "rumor mill" story on that site, Is Bush Out Of Control?, which actually made it into the Harper's Weekly email news summary yesterday ("It was reported that Bush is losing his mind [link], and a man in Georgia..."). Talk about "in passing!" Maybe he thought if he inserted it casually most people would not notice?

Finally, let's get everybody out for The Colorado Walk to pass C and D and end the "permanent bad year" of TABOR's effect on public funding. Sign up for a short walk between Monument and the north end of the Air Force Academy, or any other segment: 9/20, 9/21, 9/22 and 9/24 will be segments in and through Colorado Springs. Check out the website! I heard about it from Ed Gordon's spot on Air America radio (AM 760 out of Boulder - yes, we get it here).

TABOR and why this is SO BAD: In case you're new to this, TABOR has a lot of sensible stuff, and each year the spending on services and programs is increased by basically a cost-of-living increase, but the idiotic thing which got through was that if the economy has a BAD year, the scale for allotments to programs and services slides back down to that lowest point, and if the economy then has a few GOOD years, services are completely hosed - because the increase is very modest, and is NOT pegged to economic growth! Get it? We start losing the best employees, and then MOST employees, as our wage scales slide below the average once the economy gets going again. Isn't that intelligent?! The people who wanted that in there either were not thinking it through, thought there would never be economic dips or times of faster economic growth, or ...

...they want to destroy and privatize tax-funded institutions such as our public schools. They want a real "ownership society." Privatize fire services? Ooh, good idea, then if a poor neighborhood catches fire, they aren't paying for fire service, so it just burns down - isn't privatization great? Poor kids' schools, lacking funding, disappear for non-performance, and voila! Huge numbers of uneducated and undereducated teenagers wandering the streets with bleak futures... just who I want to meet when walking with my kids around Acacia Park.

These privatizers seem to have no concept of public spaces, public good, or community, outside of their particular church. And relying on churches for social services works so well: that poor New Life Church volunteer - Julie Rifkin - who lost her job with The Navigators Ministries and wound up shooting herself and her two sons (whom she had had to withdraw from the Evangelical Christian Academy because she couldn't pay) last spring is an excellent example of the effect this attitude can have. Her New Life preacher (Ted Haggard) was attacking Memorial Hospital for letting her go home - he should have been looking within and asking why one of his devoted flock was *in* such desperate straits, why she had to pull her kids out of the school they attended with *his* kids, even why she eventually left his enormous congregation for another church. Instead, we get a "Memorial hospital should have taken care of her" spiel. So often, when things go wrong, the same people who don't want to actually pay taxes for public services are wondering aloud why the public services are failing them.

Excerpt from The Colortado Springs Independent after the Rifkin tragedy:

"As funding for mental-health and substance-abuse programs has been cut by 30 percent in the last three years, patients are increasingly being turned away, she said. Many wind up in emergency rooms, like Memorial Hospital's, which deals with 400 patients with such problems each month -- a staggering 13 a day.

About a third of them are held for further evaluation.

Last week, Ted Haggard, the pastor of New Life Church, where Rifkin attended, publicly scolded the hospital for not holding Rifkin.

Colorado Employment Still Lagging

Bob Powell of Exponential Improvement has analyzed the job situation in Colorado. We're still lagging from the highs of 2001. No surprise there -- gee, who's been in charge in Colorado since then? Governor Bill Owens [R], and a Republican house and senate.

Some highlights:

• Colorado is 25,000 jobs short of the 2001 peak.
• Considering those who would have come into the workforce since the 2001 peak, the Colorado job backlog is between 35,000 and 42,000 jobs.
• The Colorado job growth rate in the 1990s was 71% greater than the current job growth rate.
• "Official" unemployment is a vast understatement of real unemployment. "Effective" unemployment is of order 9 - 12%. Counting others, the slack in the labor force is over 20%. Whether 1 in 10 or 2 in 10, that's a lot of slack.
• Economic development must be based on increased innovation and the ability to profit from innovation (e.g., by keeping manufacturing in the U.S.).
• Because of where the economy is in the "long wave" with a global glut of supply, tax policy should be geared to increasing demand, not increasing investment.

The Democrats came back into power last year thanks to an inspired base, fed-up independents, and a revulsion at the constant hate-mongering and social regression of the right.

Dems immediately started working on substantive issues that affect Coloradoan's daily lives: schools, roads, that G*D* TABOR, and jobs.

(Editor's note: may you rot in hell, Doug-Z)

The Dems didn't work on gay marriage, the ten commandments, lowering taxes to zero, or any of that garbage. They are doing what all good civil servants do: they're serving all Coloradoans responsibly to make this a better place to live.

Bush Vacation: Day 21

Another innovation from the Can't-Be-Bothered President™: a vacation from your vacation. I hope one day all Americans will be able to take advantage of this wonderful new trend in total relaxation and complete dissociation from the woes of the world.

If Bush has said it once, he's said it a thousand times: it's hard work doin' all that Preznit'n. He deserves a vacation.

Especially when the dogs of the left - PETA, MoveOn, Michael Moore, those damned "mothers" with their dead "children", and just about anyone who doesn't support the catastrophe in Iraq are making all that noise outside his gates.

Why can't can't they just "get on with their lives"?

But if he's going to take a break from his break to come out and compare Iraq to World War II, then he should just cancel the rest of his 5-week vacation now. Would FDR have taken 5 weeks during WWII? No. Would Bill Clinton have taken 5 weeks if we were in Iraq? NO. Would the Republicans have kept quiet while Al Gore took a 5 week vacation while we were at war? NO!

Instead of giving speeches, the President should sit down with his cabinet, burn the midnight oil, and come up with something to get us out of Iraq and get on with the fight against bin Laden. And rebuild our Armed Forces.

He should show us what leadership is.

He should make an example of sacrifice for the common good.

He should quit playing Reagan and start acting like FDR.

Repeating the stale claim that 9/11 was Saddam's work is a waste of good oxygen. Sleeping well at night is an insult to our troops who have mortars crashing by their pillows.

"Stay the course" is not a plan.

Bush Vacation: Day 20

Gas prices: holding.

Soldiers in Afghanistan: 13 dead in August. Looks like our allies in Pakistan have something to do with this.

While protesters attempt to shed some light from outside his speech, Bush said "the only way to defend to our citizens where we live is to go after the terrorists where they live."

He conveniently misremembered the fact that terrorists were not in Iraq (Living? maybe, but no one important. Training? highly doubtful -- you think Saddam would put up with that?) before we hit the purée button. But now, according to even our own CIA, Iraq is a terrorist training ground. And they're going back into Afghanistan to help the Taliban.

Oh, and I hope this isn't President George W. Bush's (he is The Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United State of America, you know?) idea of a "noble cause":

"One of the biggest problems I deal with is the fact that even though we fought a three day battle to secure an IP station and we won. We abandoned it the next day and within a week the Mahdi army bullied all the Iraqi police out of it, placed demo charges and blew it up. And our leadership didn't even bat an eye. Can't figure out why we would fight so hard for something that had 4 guys killed and 12 wounded just so we can let it get blown up." (from DailyKos)

Because it really renders the words meaningless.

How we are going to get through the next three years status quo is beyond my imagination.

Diligent Tongues

James Wolcott, brilliant as ever, dissects the subdural sexism that infects the smears against Cindy Sheehan. By the time you reach the phrase in question, you'll have to finish the essay, which has all Wolcott's best attributes, and should put the Gang of 500 to shame for their diligent tongues.

Bush Vacation: Day 19

4 GI's killed in Afgahnistan. (update: 3 wounded in same incident. 2 diplomats wounded in Kabul)

Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan fails.

Bush tours his own ranch again - identifies insurgent brush that needs clearing.

Army plans 4 more years in Iraq: The Army is planning for the possibility of keeping the current number of soldiers in well over 100,000 — for four more years, the Army's top general said Saturday. I guess that "6 month" estimate didn't work out quite so well.


Looks like the spidey hole we got Saddam out of has just become deeper, more impenetrable, and full of more problems than ever.