Truth Out:

The Senate quietly passed legislation Thursday implementing tough new sanctions against Iran that advocacy groups say will cause more pain for the citizens of the country than for the government it's intended to cripple.

At what point do progressives stop being Democrats' whipped dogs and start acting like a movement capable of putting the Dems in their proper place as the party of the people? David Sirota wrote today about Obama's latest call to increase war spending beyond its already ludicrous proportions.

How many of the extreme right-wing and criminal policies of Bush-Cheney has Obama adopted? How many of those extreme right-wing policies has he exceeded? Last month, knowledge that Obama has gone a step further than Bush, authorizing the executive branch to murder American citizens on the flimsiest of rationales. This sh__ has GOT to end.

Given that O's SOTU will propose a vile goulash of war, neo liberal austerity, abridgements of civil rights, foot dragging on climate change, meaningless tax cuts double talk on Wall Street bonuses, vague, but increasingly apparent gestures in the direction of cutting Medicare and Social Security, etc.

Why the hell is there absolutely no organizing or even discussion of massive protests against the slide into barbarism which O is willingly and enthusiastically presiding over?

Jon Walker over at Fire Dog Lake makes a very effective argument about why learning the wrong lesson from the defeat of Martha Coakley in Tuesday's Massachusetts Senate race will lead to disaster.

Iran Aide Dennis Ross Moving to White House

I agree with this guy so damn near never it's hard to believe I'm doing it now. But on this point, Israel's existence is, indeed, the target Hamas, Hezbollah, and Al Qaeda have all dedicated themselves to destroying -- and Iran is backing them. Over the years since Reagan yanked the Marines out of Lebanon following the barracks bombings, the US has been a partly-involved, often-inconsistent supporter of Israel. Oddly enough, Israel in its early years was dependent on the USSR for weapons and support. "Progressive" thought is that the Palestinians should overrun Israel, and destroy the Jewish nation as an interloper. "Progressive" thought can go suck

Until 1947, the United States habitually told the truth about at least one thing. The job title of the Pentagon's highest ranking civilian was the Secretary of War. But the recent slaughter of tens of millions in the Second World War had given the Pentagon's real function a bad name. So Democrat Harry Truman rebranded the Department of War, naming it the Department of Defense. From that day, the Secretary of War became the Secretary of Defense. War plants, war expenditures and bloodthirsty war industries became more benign-sounding defense plants, the defense expenditures and the patriotic defense industry.

President Obama's global agenda, part two: Iran

Woohoo!! My DVD arrived today!

Persepolis is the animated film by Marjane Satrapi, relating her coming of age in Iran, starting before the fall of the Shah regime to today.

The film is divided into several segments:  Read more…

Like it or not, our next president will have to deal with conflicts all over the world. The nature of warfare has been changing (a lot of ink has been spent on this already) but obviously, this administration did not read the memo.

In today’s WaPo, an article on Page 12 discusses Admiral Fallon’s firing expulsion forced exit resignation from CentCom. Not to worry, the article says, and surely with a placement on Page 12 there must not be anything in it to cause concern. If there were, WaPo’s editors would have made sure it was right up front and not down in the body – wouldn’t they?

The New York Times is reporting that Admiral William Fallon, the top commander in the Middle East, is retiring early.

As you probably already know Admiral Fallon has been at the center of recent controversy for opposing any war with Iran. So, naturally, having said something so sane and sensible, he must be driven out of his job.

See the NYT article.

Fascinating article by Thomas Barnett in the April Esquire on Admiral Fallon, who sits as apparently the only remaining obstacle between the Bush-Cheney criminal regime and war with Iran. Every time Bush rattles his saber, Fallon makes the regional diplomatic rounds to calm fears of an expanded, uncontrollable conflict and makes public announcements that he thinks going to war would be a mistake.

According to Barnett, Bush/Cheney are tired of Fallon’s unwillingness to get with the program and are planning to move him out of the way.

AL gets letters:

A friend writes from Tehran:

Here the political weather is terrible. You might know that the parliamentary election is near and the reformist nearly are not allowed to be involved. About 80 per cent of reformist candidates has been labeled as unqualified by the Government. Mr Khatami and Rafsanjani had a meeting with the Supreme Leader but it had no fruit. We are waiting for much worse days.

The Iranian film festival has been just finished with no movie by great directors of the country. All movies were about Islam, religious rites and Imams. Good for Ahmadinejad!

I love my country but i really hate it. That’s iranian life. Always dealing with dilemmas.

To which I'd like to respond:

DOE: Sees 125,000 B/D SPR Fill Rate May-Sep

NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- The U.S. will add 125,000 barrels a day of crude oil to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve between May and September 2008 through direct market purchases and transfers of royalty oil, a Department of Energy spokeswoman said Wednesday.

Fifth cable cut to Mid-East, Iran has only limited access to the Internet

Pre-emptive nuclear strike a key option, Nato told

And the Jackass Texan.

From Navy Times:

The threatening radio transmission heard at the end of a video showing harassing maneuvers by Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz may have come from a locally famous heckler known among ship drivers as the “Filipino Monkey.”

Now you tell us. Not that anyone is really covering it in the major media.

Everything that comes from Chimpy's administration and his SCLM sternographers, that is. Via Uruknet, comes this Times report which should tell you a thing or two about the Iranian "threat:"

Marie Colvin
THE HEAD of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps slipped into the green zone of Baghdad last month to press Tehran’s hardline position over the terms of the current talks with American officials, it was claimed last week.

Iraqi government sources say that Major-General Mohammed Ali Jafari, 50, travelled secretly from Tehran. Jafari appears to have passed through checkpoints on his way into the fortified enclave that contains the American embassy and Iraqi ministries, even though he is on Washington’s “most wanted” list.

Nobody seems to be mentioning that speedboat tactics are remarkably similar to the tactics employed by General Paul Van Riper when he whipped the Pentagon using lo-tech tactics during the Operation Millennium Challenge war game for the Gulf. Shystee wrote:

Van Riper was the commander of a fictional middle eastern state (Iraq, or possibly Iran) attempting to repel a US attack.

The games were designed to test experimental new tactics and doctrines advocated by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and were referred to in Pentagon-speak as “military transformation”.
…
[Van Riper] sent orders with motorcycle couriers to evade sophisticated electronic eavesdropping equipment. When the US fleet sailed into the Gulf, he instructed his small boats and planes to move around in apparently aimless circles before launching a surprise attack which sank a substantial part of the US navy. The war game had to be stopped and the American ships “refloated” so that the US forces stood a chance.

More from the Guardian. The beauty part is that Rummy's Pentagon didn't like the outcome, so they rewrote the war game rules so Van Riper would lose and then ran the game again. Mission Accomplished!

But never fear, 90% of the agenda was "accomplished."

Heroes in the Beltway:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, despite their pledges to continue pushing to end the war in Iraq, face growing pressure from their rank-and-file Democrats to focus more attention on domestic, "pocketbook" issues in the upcoming election year.

Junior Democrats describe an "Iraq fatigue" setting in among some members after dozens of successful withdrawal votes failed to drive a wedge between Republicans and President Bush on the war strategy....

[Baird:] "The entire policy has been dictated by the 'Out of Iraq
Caucus' ... What are we going to do, have another 40 withdrawal votes?"

Folks enjoying Christmas in Iraq:

Exhaustion and combat stress are besieging US troops in Iraq as they battle with a new type of warfare. Some even rely on Red Bull to get through the day. As desertions and absences increase, the military is struggling to cope with the crisis.

Lieutenant Clay Hanna looks sick and white. Like his colleagues he does not seem to sleep. Hanna says he catches up by napping on a cot between operations in the command centre, amid the noise of radio. He is up at 6am and tries to go to sleep by 2am or 3am. But there are operations to go on, planning to be done and after-action reports that need to be written. And war interposes its own deadly agenda that requires his attention and wakes him up.

Bush calls on Iran to "come clean".

Leaving aside the obvious bad jokes, didn't I just read something in the news about an NIE?

Times, three minutes ago:

A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains on hold, contradicting an assessment two years ago that Tehran was working inexorably toward building a bomb.

Gee.

It's almost like all the sabre-rattling and threats and bullying were designed to get Iran to restart its program, isn't it?

At last, somebody from outside the Village looks at the stories Bush has been telling on Iran. McClatchy:

Despite President Bush's claims that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons that could trigger "World War III," experts in and out of government say there's no conclusive evidence that Tehran has an active nuclear-weapons program.

Oh my gawd! Say it's not so! But wait--Maybe the Iranians trucked the weapons across the border to Syria?

Bush's rhetoric seems hyperbolic compared with the measured statements by his senior aides and outside experts.

You're kidding!  Read more…

A lot of folks are chattering about a fresh poll from Zogby, in which 52% of the respondents were favorable to an attack on Iran. I've seen other numbers in other polls, some with support for an attack in the low 20s. Obviously, an attack is a stupid idea neither the nation nor the military can really afford, and would have all sorts of horrible consequences; there is also no real threat from Iran, unless by threat you mean "brown not-xtians making lots of money selling oil."

They're the NSC staffers and Iranian experts who censored by the administration when they wrote on Op-Ed for the Times--and the Times went ahead and published it with parts blacked out, as if the country had turned into a fucking Banana Republic.

So, go read.

Well, naturally. They're not Christianists. And they're not doing God's work. What's to like? UK Daily Mail:

British MPs visiting the Pentagon to discuss America's stance on Iran and Iraq were shocked to be told by one of President Bush's senior women officials: "I hate all Iranians."

The all-party group of MPs say Debra Cagan, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Coalition Affairs to Defence Secretary Robert Gates, made the comments this month. [One] said: "She is very forceful and some of my colleagues were intimidated by her muscular style."

Right, then. Of course, the administration says the Brits are lying: