Iraq Panel to Recommend Pullback of Combat Troops
By David E. Sanger and David S. Cloud
Published: November 30, 2006

WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 - The bipartisan Iraq Study Group reached a consensus on Wednesday on a final report that will call for a gradual pullback of the 15 American combat brigades now in Iraq but stop short of setting a firm timetable for their withdrawal, according to people familiar with the panel’s deliberations.

The report leaves unstated whether the 15 combat brigades that are the bulk of American fighting forces in Iraq would be brought home, or simply pulled back to bases in Iraq or in neighboring countries.

"I think we've played a constructive role," one person involved in the committee's deliberations said, "but from the beginning, we've worried that this entire agenda could be swept away by events."

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Judge strikes down Bush on terror groups

LOS ANGELES - A federal judge struck down President Bush's authority to designate groups as terrorists, saying his post-Sept. 11 executive order was unconstitutionally vague, according to a ruling released Tuesday.

"This law gave the president unfettered authority to create blacklists," said David Cole, a lawyer for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Constitutional Rights that represented the group. "It was reminiscent of the McCarthy era."

U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins enjoined the government from blocking the assets of the two groups. The same judge two years ago invalidated portions of the Patriot Act.

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Sadr is so powerful that if provincial elections were held now, he would sweep most of the south and also take Baghdad :: WaPo link

The Islamic Republic of Iraq has turned to it's creator with defiance and bitterness as is reflected in the polls which show the Iraqi want us out of their country.   The American Public has cast it's vote of no-confidence in the inept and corrupt handling of the war.   The reality that Iraq is a lose / lose proposition has finally overcome the propoganda spewing forth from the spinmeisters of Washington D.C.

Bush has finally and reluctantly accepted the facts that he must let his father's team take control.   They and the new leadership and oversight of the new Democratic Majority in Congress are now burdened with salvaging the ruined folly of his mistakes.   Drastic measures are called for where none look promising.

Addressing the sectarian problem by engaging Iraq's neighbors, notably Iran and Syria, is an idea gaining favor within the 10-member, bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which is in the final phase of its eight-month search for a new policy. But the panel was still deeply divided over recommendations going into its meeting yesterday. :: WaPo link

There is nothing positive to be gained by our continued presence there.   It is time to get our people out of the crossfire.   That may be the best we can do within the reality of Bush's Nightmare...

The Dark Wraith ForumsThankfulness

To Mr. Bush:

You, sir, have given me such a renewed sense of life, even as your policies have taken the lives of almost three thousand of my fellow Americans who are soldiers and perhaps 650,000 of my brothers and sisters in a land of which I knew little and cared less only six short years ago. I should be dispirited by such appalling carnage, yet I am curiously—perhaps troublingly—enlivened by the scope of this engine of death that has become my country.

I want it not to be this way; but in the effects of what you have done, I now have returned to something I had forgotten: you were always there.

I don't mean you, personally, but you as an attitude, a posture, a way of Americanism that had been lurking in the shadows all the years I was becoming complacent, all the years I was imagining a world becoming better. It was not; and it was not because you as a face of America had always been there waiting to return from the receding memories of Vietnam, Central America, and other places most people don't even know about.

I almost forgot, as I drifted into this century in a sort of self-assured, half-slumber of comfort about America's future.

You reminded me that my America is not everybody's America; and if I should want my America, I must be forever diligent, eternally at the guard, and permanently ready to fight for it, perhaps even with my life, which you, I am most certain, would be willing to take if I were to become too much a vexation to you and your kind.

I am thankful for you, sir, because I now know that my kind probably outnumber yours: for you to stop us from stopping you, you will have to hurt a lot of people. Several hundred men being tortured in horrible isolation from the world? Three thousand or so American GIs dead? Twenty or thirty thousand more wounded? Six hundred fifty thousand Iraqis who have ceased to breathe?

You haven't even begun to see what you'll have to do to stop the world from stopping you.

Even from the tiny hill upon which I stand here in cyberspace, I can see thousands upon thousands who share my revulsion at you. Not merely at your policies, Mr. Bush, but at you: you as a coward, you as a liar, you as a manipulator, you as a torturer, you as a breeder of death, you as a destroyer of America's future, you as a taker from the poor, you as a giver to the rich, you as a phony from the day you set foot on this good earth.

You have bound millions and millions to a vision of America radically at odds with your own; and in so doing, you have made many of those people realize that they really do love that America, the one with broad and ever-expanding liberty, the one where laws compel the enforcers far more than they do the masses, the one ever striving to the promise of a living constitution that commences with a long bill of rights, not a summary manifesto of repression. I could not have hoped for a man whose America is so vile that he would make so many strive so hard for a nation so fundamentally different from that.

You have made patriots, Mr. Bush, the kind who will not yield their country to an outcast from a bleak, brutish land of cruel people. You have made patriots of tens of millions, not just here in the United States, but around the world. Have you any idea how grateful the world will be when you are finally removed from the stage and sent back to the shadows whence you came? Have you any idea, sir, how many people around the world will celebrate, certainly with great caution, the return of hope that this nation can lead by moral principle and not by incompetent violence? The world needs the United States, and the world will once again have it, staggered, poorer, a bit humbler, and all of that to the better if it is to pose as the wise and chastened leader.

I am thankful for you, Mr. Bush. You have made me once again the patriot I once was, and in this renewed vigor to a better world, I am willing to withstand you, and I can do so in no small part because you have made so many, many others utterly resolute in reclaiming this nation and, indeed, this world from your kind.

May you have a good and bountiful Thanksgiving, George W. Bush; and may you be secure in the thought that you are appreciated so much by me, as I contemplate the world and this republic in the hard and joyous task of rebuilding this nation from the shattered land you have made of it. I shall in that glad time, then, end my days pursuing the purpose that was reborn in the time of your tyranny; and every one of those days of that future, I shall rejoice in the certain knowledge that you and those like you can do no more harm, at least until a future generation falls into that slumber of complacency.

The Dark Wraith has spoken.

And, yes, I DO take it personally

THE ULTIMATE REFUND: On November 24th and 25th - the busiest days in the American retail calendar and the unofficial start of the international Christmas-shopping season - thousands of activists and concerned citizens in 65 countries will take a 24-hour consumer detox as part of the 14th annual Buy Nothing Day, a global phenomenon that originated in Vancouver, Canada.

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washingtonpost.com Democrats' Victory Is Felt On K Street

By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 23, 2006; Page A01

Drug companies are particularly hungry for Democratic help, including the industry's trade association. "We woke up the day after the election to a new world," said Ken Johnson, spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. "We're going to have tough days ahead of us."

A post-election e-mail to executives at the drug company GlaxoSmithKline details just how tough. "We now have fewer allies in the Senate," says the internal memo, obtained by The Washington Post. "Thus, there is greater risk over the next two years that bad amendments will be offered to pending legislation." The company's primary concerns are bills that would allow more imported drugs and would force price competition for drugs bought under Medicare.

The defeat of Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) "creates a big hole we will need to fill," the e-mail says. Sen.-elect Jon Tester (D-Mont.) "is expected to be a problem," it says, and the elevation to the Senate of Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) "will strengthen his ability to challenge us."

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