GREETINGS FELLOW DEMOCRATS!





Celebrate Freedom!

A little over 4 months until the election. The office will be closed on July 4. Be safe and enjoy the birth of our country day.


And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.
John F. Kennedy

Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.
Adlai Stevenson

Where liberty dwells there is my country.
Ben Franklin

If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led like sheep to a slaughter.
George Washington

Liberty is its own reward.
Woodrow Wilson

My kind of loyalty was to one's country, not to its institutions or its office holders.
Mark Twain





Calculate you Carbon Footprint

http://www.carbonfootprint.com

If you don’t know what a carbon footprint is, read http://www.carbonfootprint.com/carbonfootprint.html

America consumes 31.2 billion water bottles a year taking 17.6 million barrels of oil to create them. Enough to fuel 1.5 million cars for a year. America consumes 100 billion plastic bags a year taking 12 million barrels of oil. World figures? 154.3 billion water bottles and 500 billion - 1 trillion bags=147.4 - 207.4 million barrels of oil a year.

http://digg.com/environment/America_s_dirty_little_oil_secret_Plastic_Bottles_and_Bags





Increased US Military Operations Inside Iran's Borders

By David Edwards

CNN’s Candy Crowley talked with Seymour Hersh about his new article in The New Yorker that says the Bush Administration has increased military operations inside Iran’s borders.

Hersh said, “Well, one of the basic points is no matter what we say about diplomacy, you know, carrot and stick, the stick is working pretty hard and the stick is working overtime. This president did escalate the secret war inside Iran. We’ve been doing stuff inside Iran since ‘05 pretty heavily, Looking at the nuclear facilities, collecting intelligence and trying to undermine the regime, et cetera, et cetera but there was a significant escalation this year.”

“They got a great deal of authorization to spend up to $400 million. That doesn’t mean he’s spent it all yet but he’s got that kind of authorization. The secret committees — anyone who saw “Charlie Wilson’s war,” — Charlie Wilson was able to generate a lot of money secretly. That’s what happens in Congress and the other major thing is we’ve sent in a special task force that operates out of Afghanistan into Iran.”

“I did notice what Ambassador Crocker said about ‘not cross-border’ and I have a lot of respect for him and I don’t want to challenge him. But the fact is were inside but not necessarily cross-border. We have teams inside Iran. These include joint special operations forces, the most elite commando units and basically they’re guys go after high-value targets around the world. They capture them or kill them so it’s a significant increase in American potential for damage inside Iran.”

This video is from CNN’s Late Edition, broadcast June 29, 2008. http://rawstory.com/rawreplay/?p=1384





It Was Oil, All Along

By Bill Moyers
Created Jun 28 2008 - 4:03pm

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn't a war about oil. That's cynical and simplistic, they said. It's about terror and al Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire, and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be....the bottom line. It is about oil.

Alan Greenspan said so last fall. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve, safely out of office, confessed in his memoir, "...Everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." He elaborated in an interview with the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, "If Saddam Hussein had been head of Iraq and there was no oil under those sands, our response to him would not have been as strong as it was in the first gulf war."

Remember, also, that soon after the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, told the press that war was our only strategic choice. "...We had virtually no economic options with Iraq," he explained, "because the country floats on a sea of oil."

Shades of Daniel Plainview, the monstrous petroleum tycoon in the movie There Will Be Blood. Half-mad, he exclaims, "There's a whole ocean of oil under our feet!" then adds, "No one can get at it except for me!"

No wonder American troops only guarded the Ministries of Oil and the Interior in Baghdad, even as looters pillaged museums of their priceless antiquities. They were making sure no one could get at the oil except... guess who?

Here's a recent headline in The New York Times: "Deals with Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back." Read on: "Four western companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power."

There you have it. After a long exile, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP are back in Iraq. And on the wings of no-bid contracts - that's right, sweetheart deals like those given Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater. The kind of deals you get only if you have friends in high places. And these war profiteers have friends in very high places.

Let's go back a few years to the 1990's, when private citizen Dick Cheney was running Halliburton, the big energy supplier. That's when he told the oil industry that, "By 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."

Fast forward to Cheney's first heady days in the White House. The oil industry and other energy conglomerates have been headed backdoor keys to the White House, and their CEO's and lobbyists were trooping in and out for meetings with their old opal, now Vice President Cheney. The meetings are secret, conducted under tight security, but as we reported five years ago, among the documents that turned up from some of those meetings were maps of oil fields in Iraq - and a list of companies who wanted access to them. The conservative group Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club filed suit to try to find out who attended the meetings and what was discussed, but the White House fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the press and public from learning the whole truth.

Think about it. These secret meetings took place six months before 9/11, two years before Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq. We still don't know what they were about. What we know is that this is the oil industry that's enjoying swollen profits these days. It would be laughable if it weren't so painful to remember that their erstwhile cheerleader for invading Iraq - the press mogul Rupert Murdoch - once said that a successful war there would bring us $20 a barrel of oil. The last time we looked, it was more than $140 a barrel. Where are you, Rupert, when the facts need checking and the predictions are revisited?

At a congressional hearing this week, James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who exactly twenty years ago alerted Congress and the world to the dangers of global warming, compared the chief executives of Big Oil to the tobacco moguls who denied that nicotine is addictive or that there's a link between smoking and cancer. Hansen, who the administration has tried again and again to silence, said these barons of black gold should be tried for committing crimes against humanity and nature in opposing efforts to deal with global warming.

Perhaps those sweetheart deals in Iraq should be added to his proposed indictments. They have been purchased at a very high price. Four thousand American soldiers dead, tens of thousands permanently wounded for life, hundreds of thousands of dead and crippled Iraqis plus five million displaced, and a cost that will mount into trillions of dollars. The political analyst Kevin Phillips says America has become little more than an "energy protection force," doing anything to gain access to expensive fuel without regard to the lives of others or the earth itself. One thinks again of Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. His lust for oil came at the price of his son and his soul.
_______

About author

Bill Moyers is managing editor of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.





Brazos County Democratic Party
P.O. Box 4568
Bryan Texas 77805
979-779-5600 Fax 979-779-5601

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.
Harry S. Truman, Democrat, President of the United States of America