January 28, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH



IMPEACH CHENEY




ROMNEY THE JOB SLASHER



In the recent primary campaign in Michigan you would have thought Mitt Romney was a guardian of working class people and working class jobs. Romney has touted himself as experienced in business and said he would bring that expertise to the White House. But the record is that Romney, in his role as businessman, slashed jobs. It's the Republican way to talk about job creation while doing everything possible to eliminate jobs and decent wages. This article by Robert Gavin is at www.boston.com:



In early 1995, as the Ampad paper plant in Marion, Ind., neared its shutdown following a bitter strike, Randy Johnson, a worker and union official, scrawled a personal letter to Mitt Romney, pouring out his disappointment that Romney, then chief executive of the investment firm that controlled Ampad, had not done enough to settle the strike and save some 200 jobs.


"We really thought you might help," Johnson said in the handwritten note, "but instead we heard excuses that were unacceptable from a man of your prominent position."


Romney, who had recently lost a Senate race in which the strike became a flashpoint, responded that he had "privately" urged a settlement, but was advised by lawyers not to intervene directly. His political interests, he explained, conflicted with his business responsibilities.


Now, Romney's decision to stay on the sidelines as his firm, Bain Capital, slashed jobs at the office supply manufacturer stands in marked contrast to his recent pledges to beleaguered auto workers in Michigan and textile workers in South Carolina to "fight to save every job."


IRAQ: TEMPLATE FOR A BAD WAR



John McCain is running as the most militaristic of the very militaristic Republican slate of candidates. McCain has his experience in Vietnam and as a prisoner of war to give him some veneer of credibility on military matters. But being a POW doesn't make you an expert on military strategy. This commentary by P. M. Carpenter talks about past military thinkers like Dwight D. Eisenhower and George Marshall and how they would have viewed this disaster in Iraq. The commentary is at pmcarpenter.blogs.com:



It so happened that when I read that I had just put down a marvelous new work on military history: Mark Perry's Partners in Command, an investigation into the working relationship between Generals George C. Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower. And the meticulously driven subtext of Perry's work is that both of these incisive military minds and, later, shapers of America's foreign policy, would have been appalled -- absolutely aghast -- at the United States' entry into Iraq.


Both would have left aside the question of apologies, because both, quite simply, would have found the intervention utterly inexcusable -- a betrayal of America's political culture, societal way of thinking, and even common sense.


Marshall and Eisenhower thought alike because in the 1920s they had both studied at the feet of a certain General Fox Conner, a military genius of unusual sociopolitical insight as well. And what Conner taught them -- what he hammered away at with singular emphasis -- was that, as Perry succinctly worded it, we were "Never [to] fight unless you have to, never fight alone, and never fight for long." (It was these lessons that Eisenhower had in mind, as president, when he pulled our sorry butts out of Korea's human meat-grinder.)