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And here is what our senator Murray contributed to the blood-fest that is the funding bill: "The Senate’s placeholder bill, passed by voice vote, would provide no money. Rather, it incorporates a resolution (S Res 107) sponsored by Patty Murray, D-Wash., that the Senate adopted March 15 on a 96-2 vote. The language expresses the sense of the Senate that Congress should not undermine the safety of the armed forces.
"Before passing the bill, the Senate agreed by voice vote to amend it with the Murray language, after voting 94-1 to limit debate on the amendment. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., cast the lone “no” vote." Feingold criticized the Senate maneuver to get the bill to conference, saying, “We need full debate and votes, not backroom agreements. Ramming a symbolic bill through the Senate so that the actual bill can be written by a handful of people behind closed doors is unacceptable.”
No debate, voice votes. WHAT BLASTED COWARDS! Linda
Link to whole Chris Floyd Article (see a portion below):
http://www.uruknet.de/?s1=1&p=32945&s2=18
"In fact, the bill in question, the Feingold Plan, would not have actually ended the illegal occupation of Iraq -- God forbid! However, it would have curtailed the extent of the war crime to some degree -- withdrawing "combat forces" but keeping troops in Iraq for "counterterrorism" (and aren't we constantly told that all the Iraqi insurgents are "terrorists"?) and "training Iraqi forces" and protecting the fortress embassy being constructed in the heart of Baghdad. But even this slight slackening of the garrotte would not have taken effect until April 2008 -- or after 10 more months of savage "surging" by Bush and his sectarian death-squadding allies. (Such as this kind of thing.)
Later in the article:
"It was a vain hope, of course. The Democrats (with a handful of honorable exceptions) had already displayed their preternatural spinelessness throughout the Bush imperium, culminating in their failure last fall to mount a proper, furious, public, frenzied -- if doomed -- resistance to the "Military Commissions Act," the anti-Magna Carta measure that transformed the United States into a banana republic run by a tyrannical "Unitary Executive" and his military junta. (The essence of the bill allows the unchallengeable Commander-in-Chief to declare anyone on earth an "enemy combatant" and keep them chained up indefinitely, with only one legal recourse allowed: a military tribunal, set up by the Commander, for those captives he decides to put to the question. As for the rest, they can rot forever at his pleasure.)
"The Democrats, afraid of looking "soft" on terrorism, put up only the most token, tepid defense of the Constitutional Republic and let the MCA sail through, all the while telling their supporters with a wink: "This is just tactical. Wait till we win back Congress in November, then we'll get rid of this law." Yet the mephitic measure remains on the books, in full force -- five months after the Democrats were sworn in.
"It was therefore the height of folly -- or the depths of desperation -- to believe that these Democrats would do anything substantial to upset the imperial apple-cart that Bush has set rolling through the Middle East and Central Asia. They are too cowardly, too co-opted, too corrupt and too comfortable to challenge the long-standing, bipartisan policies of loot and domination that have burdened us with a vast empire of more than 730 military bases on every continent, and endless, churning wars -- overt and covert, direct and proxy -- all over the world.
"After all, the Democratic leaders are among the elite who have profited most handsomely from the imperial arrogance that has bankrupted the national treasury, distorted the economy, perverted our society and left Americans more at threat than ever before. (Arthur Silber has much more on the bipartisan imperium in his "Dominion" series.) The Democratic Establishmentarians, like their Republican counterparts, are wealthy, well-fed, well-wadded and secure behind their phalanxes of state and private security. The actual effects of their policies -- the death, grief, ruin, hardship, suffering and fear they inflict on ordinary people, at home and abroad -- never touch the elite. They hear the cries as from a great distance, they see the destruction as through a glass, darkly. And so it will go on, and on, and on. The Democrats -- especially these Democrats -- are not going to stop it. ***
SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) -- “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” (Calgacus, as quoted by Tacitus, Agricola 30-31)"
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