“this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday.” – Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev

The war is lost because the Iraqi people are fighting amongst themselves? Please don’t believe this crap…think for yourself. Imagine for a moment watching the Super Bowl game with your family and friends. It’s half time and your team is up 21 to 3 but they’ve lost a couple key players due to injuries and have already been penalized much more than normal. Would you look at your friends and say: “I don’t think we can win this one?”

The next weekend you’re watching a Heavyweight boxing match. Your guy has knocked down his opponent three times already and won every round but has yet to deliver the knock out punch. The bell rings and the last round begins and your guy comes out strong although he has a terrible black eye. Do you look at your buddies and say: “He’s losing this fight?”

Of course you would not, so why then are we hearing so much about losing the war in Iraq? We have been penalized, we have lost some players and we have a nasty black eye…but we have already won this war. We have done everything we promised we would, we have removed Saddam Hussein from power, destroyed his evil Baath regime, and installed a Democracy in Iraq with three free and successful elections under their belt.

Yes the Shi’a and Sunnis are involved in a Civil War, with the removal of Saddam’s brutal police force and military this was bound to happen. Saddam was a Sunni, as was everyone in the ruling party. With his iron fist the Sunnis ruled for decades in Iraq and any attempt the Shi’a made was brutality quashed. What we’re seeing on the News today is nothing new; they’ve been fighting since the death of Mohammad, almost 1,400 years ago when Islam split into the two factions. They will most likely be fighting for a long time to come…but what does that have to do with OUR war?

Here’s what I think happened. After the 2004 reelection of President Bush, a bunch of Democratic elite politicians and strategists began scheming. They decided that in order to regain the House and Senate in 06 and the Whitehouse in 08 they must do something about the quest for blood after 9/11 sentiment. In order to do that, they needed to turn the national pride over the war effort into disgust and malice towards our leaders. With that, they came up with the idea of us losing the war. They want us to lose this war because it’s the only way they could reclaim power.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is not a political paper, I’m not saying the Republicans are better than the Democrats because I’m sure the GOP would have done the same thing if a Dem would have been in power at the time of 9/11. I’m simply appalled at this Democratic strategy and even more so how the majority of the American public has fallen for it.

Everyone tells me, “I support the troops but I just don’t think we can win this war.” When I hear that it makes me sick. Then I ask: “Will you please tell me why you feel we’re losing the war?” It’s usually something like: “Well…Americans are dying over there.” Agreed, but in the big picture very few and in a war…people do die. Another popular response is: “We’ve created a Civil War amongst the Iraqis.” Well first of all, we haven’t created anything but an opportunity for it to flare up again. This Civil War is as old as Islam itself. Secondly…what does that have to do with us losing this war?

Many people are demanding a pull out; if you’re one of them, please consider something. What are the insurgents going to think of that? What about Iran and Syria and other Islamic crazy assholes over there? They know all they have to do is hang on, set a few bombs, and America will eventually go away. Yes, I agree we are done with this war because, as I said before, we’ve done everything we said we would. I do believe we need a major downsizing of troops in the area, but we must maintain a strong presence in the Middle East for years to come to insure our safety and security here at home.

If we do lose this war and in the bigger perspective, the showdown with Iran…it won’t be due to the Shi’a and Sunni Civil War, the lack of troops or the incompetence of the Bush Administration. It will be entirely the fault of Partisan Politics, the Media and the general public who have become like sheep. Wake up America…I’m not asking you to take my opinion on the subject or to change yours…I’m only asking that you think for yourselves and not let creeps like Harry Reid or the Media put words in your mouth or thoughts in your head.

When I heard Harry Reid spew that crap I wondered what former Presidents would have done if something like that would have been said during times of war. What if the Democratic Senate Majority Leader would have said this of Harry Truman during the Korean war? Ole Harry would have had him shot and the public wouldn’t have objected.

This is nothing but partisan politics and the only ones who suffer are the troops.

Sergeant S.W. Foster
US Army Reserves
Iraq War Veteran
http://www.DesertVets.org

You can’t be on both and you can’t be neutral.

“Marketers are hoping this is a fringe movement. The signs point
elsewhere. According to recent surveys by sociologist Juliet Schor, 81
percent of Americans believe their country is too focused on shopping,
while nearly 90 percent believe it is too materialistic.”

http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/71.php?id=258#

Breaking the Consumer Habit: Living the Buy Nothing Life
April 20, 2007:

http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/71.php?id=258#

Give it up dood, he’ll just say he’s using a public computer or somesuch.

If Micah Wright can pretend to be a Marine, Charley can pretend to be Robinson Crusoe. In the end you can’t make him confess to anything, because there’s always another story he can spin about himself.

Today’s New York Times on the reason behind the obesity epidemic:

NY Times Magazine, April 22, 2007

By MICHAEL POLLAN

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/magazine/22wwlnlede.t.html

A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the
University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski
ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery.
He wanted to figure out why it is that the most
reliable predictor of obesity in America today is
a person’s wealth. For most of history, after
all, the poor have typically suffered from a
shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it
that today the people with the least amount of
money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to
spend, using it to purchase as many calories as
he possibly could. He discovered that he could
buy the most calories per dollar in the middle
aisles of the supermarket, among the towering
canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the
typical American supermarket, the fresh foods –
dairy, meat, fish and produce – line the
perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged
goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that
a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or
potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots.
Looking for something to wash down those chips,
he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories
of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.

As a rule, processed foods are more “energy
dense” than fresh foods: they contain less water
and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which
makes them both less filling and more fattening.
These particular calories also happen to be the
least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is
why we call the foods that contain them “junk.”
Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food
game in America are organized in such a way that
if you are eating on a budget, the most rational
economic strategy is to eat badly – and get fat.

This perverse state of affairs is not, as you
might think, the inevitable result of the free
market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a
package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed
foodlike substance as an example, is a highly
complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture,
involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many
themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as
the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So
how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of
these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

For the answer, you need look no farther than the
farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and
head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation,
which comes around roughly every five years and
is about to do so again, sets the rules for the
American food system – indeed, to a considerable
extent, for the world’s food system. Among other
things, it determines which crops will be
subsidized and which will not, and in the case of
the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as
currently written offers a lot more support to
the cake than to the root. Like most processed
foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever
arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out
of corn, soybeans and wheat – three of the five
commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to
the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and
cotton are the others.) For the last several
decades – indeed, for about as long as the
American waistline has been ballooning – U.S.
agricultural policy has been designed in such a
way as to promote the overproduction of these
five commodities, especially corn and soy.

That’s because the current farm bill helps
commodity farmers by cutting them a check based
on how many bushels they can grow, rather than,
say, by supporting prices and limiting
production, as farm bills once did. The result? A
food system awash in added sugars (derived from
corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy),
as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from
both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost
nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce.
A result of these policy choices is on stark
display in your supermarket, where the real price
of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000
increased by nearly 40 percent while the real
price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined
by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful
calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is
that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

A public-health researcher from Mars might
legitimately wonder why a nation faced with what
its surgeon general has called “an epidemic” of
obesity would at the same time be in the business
of subsidizing the production of high-fructose
corn syrup. But such is the perversity of the
farm bill: the nation’s agricultural policies
operate at cross-purposes with its public-health
objectives. And the subsidies are only part of
the problem. The farm bill helps determine what
sort of food your children will have for lunch in
school tomorrow. The school-lunch program began
at a time when the public-health problem of
America’s children was undernourishment, so
feeding surplus agricultural commodities to kids
seemed like a win-win strategy. Today the problem
is overnutrition, but a school lunch lady trying
to prepare healthful fresh food is apt to get
dinged by U.S.D.A. inspectors for failing to
serve enough calories; if she dishes up a lunch
that includes chicken nuggets and Tater Tots,
however, the inspector smiles and the
reimbursements flow. The farm bill essentially
treats our children as a human Disposall for all
the unhealthful calories that the farm bill has
encouraged American farmers to overproduce.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/magazine/22wwlnlede.t.html