Pure evil for president!

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Ambassador John Bolton at #FITN in Nashua, NH

Oh, I can’t wait:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The field of Republican presidential contenders might be getting another underdog.

Former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton will announce Thursday whether he’s getting in the race, said spokesman Garrett Marquis.

Bolton, 66, served on President George W. Bush’s foreign policy team. A prominent advocate for the war in Iraq, he is widely considered a neoconservative who favors an aggressive U.S. footprint in the world.

He has talked almost exclusively about foreign policy while courting voters in early voting states such as New Hampshire and Iowa in recent months. Bolton has been a critic of GOP presidential contender Rand Paul, saying that while Republicans are stronger on foreign policy than Democrats, they should not turn to “isolationists,” which he considers the Kentucky senator to be.

“You need someone who understands in his or her gut that the most important thing they do is protect the country,” he said.

Bolton’s decision comes as the Iraq war he favored has emerged as an issue in the GOP campaign.

Nice going, assholes: House committee passes Amtrak cuts

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

As I pointed out several times, Republicans have been hacking away at Amtrak funding for decades — because they would rather privatize the lines, and we know how well that always works out. But this time, they have incredibly bad timing and you need to let your Congress critters know what you think: As investigators still… Continue reading “Nice going, assholes: House committee passes Amtrak cuts” →

Doll parts

~ susie

I was seeing this guy who fancied himself an artist. He would collect teacups, stick in a bouquet of plastic flowers, and insert a blinking doll’s eye. He was kind of a jerk, but he was tall and had a nice loft with a sauna. So there was that. Hole:

Republican Congress just proposed $300M cut in Amtrak funding

~ susie

As I pointed out several times, Republicans have been hacking away at Amtrak funding for decades — because they would rather privatize the lines, and we know how well that always works out. But this time, they have incredibly bad timing and you need to let your Congress critters know what you think: As investigators still… Continue reading “Republican Congress just proposed $300M cut in Amtrak funding” →

Pope Francis vs. USA imperialism

~ susie

oscar romero

I think everyone knows or suspected that the CIA ran the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, so this is a very interesting canonization:

Pope Francis is soon to beatify the late Monseñor Óscar Romero, the archbishop of El Salvador who was assassinated in 1980 by a right-wing, pro-capitalist death squad. Unlike others whom Francis has already consecrated, the Blessed (and, sooner than later, Saint) Romero will be a holy figure whose killers still walk the earth.

If a saint is a sanctified man of God, what do we call the killers of a saint? Is theirs an especial evil? I’m no theologian, but it seems that to kill a saint is in excess of mere man’s law. The Catholic Catechism exhaustively extols the sanctity of saints, saying that Christ’s “holiness shines in the saints.” How then do we describe a powerful organization that trains and gives sanction to the killers of saints? Even the Vatican says that Romero “was shot by a right-wing death squad,” which, as everyone who understands recent Salvadoran history knows, was trained in the United States.

During the Cold War, the Georgia-based School of the Americas (now called WHISC) trained tens of thousands of Central American soldiers for right-wing governments and insurgencies in order to neutralize leftist influence in countries like Nicaragua, Honduras, and Romero’s El Salvador, where civil wars in the 1970s and ’80s pitted U.S.-trained rightists against socialists and leftists who opposed their countries being used as a plantation in service of a Washington-backed elite.

A UN truth commission in 1993 would find that two-thirds of the right-wing soldiers in El Salvador’s horrific civil war were U.S.-trained, many of them to operate the “death squads” that became a feature of Central America while Washington played with a heavy hand to direct the region’s politics and economics.

Bishop Romero was a thorn in the side of Washington, preaching liberation theology in defense of the poor and becoming known as the “Voice of the Voiceless.” Increasingly worried about Washington’s meddling in El Salvador’s burgeoning war between rightists and leftists, Romero wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter in 1980, calling out the United States’ support for the murderous right-wing forces who “repress the people and favor the interests of the Salvadoran oligarchy.”

He continued, condemning Washington’s major role in the creation of an armed, brutal capitalist elite:
Continue reading “Pope Francis vs. USA imperialism” →