Labor Secretary Elaine Chao: Blame America’s Youth For High Unemployment Rate

By- Suzie-Q @ 6:55 PM MST

From: Think Progress

By Amanda at 7:00 pm

Labor Secretary Chao Blames High Unemployment Rate On America’s Youth»

According to new Department of Labor data released today, the U.S. unemployment rate rose from 5.0 to 5.5 percent in May, which was higher than the expected 0.1 percent jobless rate increase. It was also the largest jump in unemployment since 1986. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao put out a statement today, attempting to explain the jump. Her answer? Blame America’s youth:

Today’s increase in the unemployment rate reflects the fact that unusually large numbers of students and graduates are entering the labor market.

Chao is just trying to hide bad news. These unemployment numbers are not good, nor are they normal. As Center for American Progress Director of the American Worker Project David Madland told ThinkProgress, unemployment isn’t just for young people:

The unemployment rate for prime-working age adults – people from 25 to 54 – also increased in May, rising from 4.2 percent to 4.4 percent. In addition, the share of this age group that was employed fell slightly from 79.6 percent to 79.5 percent.

Similarly, Jared Bernstein at EPI noted that “even if we take teenagers out of the data, unemployment still rises from 4.5% to 4.8%, a considerable 0.3% increase, and well above the 4.0% adult rate of one year ago.”

New workers are always entering the market. A healthy economy can absorb them; a Bush economy can’t.

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Evening Jukebox… Summer Wine

By- Suzie-Q @ 6:45 PM MST

The Corrs and Bono- Summer Wine

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Bush & Cheney Wrapped The Lies Around The Policy..

GEF @ 3:28 PM MST

Iraq Intelligence Report Phase 2: Bush Administration Lied About Pre-Invasion Intelligence

By: C&L

VIDEO

Jon Perr at Perrspectives breaks it down:

Four years after Kansas Senator Pat Roberts triumphantly cleared the Bush administration of misusing pre-war Iraq intelligence, the Phase 2 report of the Senate Intelligence Committee he once chaired today reached a much different conclusion. After Roberts successfully stonewalled past the 2004 and 2006 elections the studies examining White House statements on the Iraqi threat and the role of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, his successor Jay Rockefeller today concluded:

“The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.”

While Democratic and Republican committee members battle it out over the implications of the Phase 2 report, Pat Roberts’ role in obstructing the investigation of the Bush administration’s uses – and misuses – of intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq is beyond dispute. Read on…

The world knew the Bush administration was lying all along, but it’s good to finally have a definitive record. Senator Pat “Memory Pills” Roberts did his level best to run interference for George Bush and unfortunately for him, he hitched his wagon to a falling star. Roberts was considered vulnerable in his home state of Kansas before the release of this report, and in a year of change and the demise of the GOP, this isn’t going to help. This doesn’t bode well for Senator John McCain either. He’s staked his whole candidacy on the failed Iraq debacle and he, along with the rest of the Republican candidates, will find it difficult to separate themselves from the disaster they helped to create.

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A Bad Night in Los Angeles

anthony @ 21:33 BST

I do not recollect being told, if indeed I ever was told, that President Kennedy had been assassinated. At the age of four years and eleven days, and having come into the world on the other side of the Atlantic, the news of his death would have been singularly meaningless to me. (Who’s President Kennedy? What’s a President? Where’s America?) In any case, JFK’s death was overshadowed for me, my father and my two younger sisters by a far more personal tragedy which, unlike my sisters, I was old enough to remember but, like them, too young fully to understand.

Not so with the death of Bobby Kennedy.

I was eleven at the time, and I was staying with my uncle and aunt in their bungalow in the seaside town of Newhaven, Sussex, during that last summer before my family moved away from the area and I was sent to boarding school.

By that time, I knew enough about the Kennedys to know who JFK and RFK were.

While I do not remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard of the shooting of Robert Kennedy, I had learnt (probably from the BBC 1 six o’clock news) that Kennedy had been shot and that his chances of survival were slim; and I remember seeing the photos of the crumpled body lying on the floor, the blood, and the rosary in his hands.

(I vaguely remember asking what a rosary was or, more probably, and this is emphatically NOT an attempt at humour, why Kennedy was holding a rose in his hand.)

I more vividly remember, about this exact time forty years ago to the day, my aunt, who, like Kennedy, had been brought up a Catholic, coming into the living room where I was playing after school and telling me that he had died, having just heard the news in the kitchen on the radio.

I remember feeling very sad when I heard the news, and tho’ I had never read John Donne, I think I understood then something of what Donne means when he says: “Do not ask for whom the bell tolls”.

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Top Air Force Officials Forced To Resign

By- Suzie-Q @ 12:05 PM MST

Top Air Force Officials Fired

Forced Resignations Come in Wake of Nuclear Screw-up and Contract Mess

By JONATHAN KARL, BRIAN ROSS, and LEN TEPPER
June 5, 2008

Two top officials at the US Air Force, Secretary Michael Wynne and Chief of Staff Michael Moseley, were fired today by the Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. The Air Force leadership has been involved in numerous recent controversies including an incident in which live nuclear bombs were flown over US airspace and for steering a contract to a retired general. The “last straw” however, according to one defense official, was a screw-up that resulted in nuclear fuses accidentally being sent to Taiwan.

Gates decided to ask for the resignations of the two officials in the wake of a blistering, and still classified, report on the Taiwan screw-up, in which four MK-12 fuses were accidentally shipped earlier this year.

“This incident represents a significant failure to ensure the security of sensitive military components,” Gates said today. “More troubling, it depicts a pattern of poor performance that was highlighted to us following last year’s incident involving the improper movement of nuclear weapons between Minot AFB and Barksdale AFB.”

More

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Afternoon Jukebox… Across The Universe

By- Suzie-Q @ 12:00 PM MST

Have a great and safe weekend everybody!   🙂

S-Q

Fiona Apple- Across The Universe

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Bu$h, Cheney, Rummy, Powell & Rice LIED 237 times about WMD

by Geezer Power…11:30 am

UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM — MINORITY STAFF
SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS DIVISION
MARCH 16, 2004
IRAQ ON THE RECORD

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S PUBLIC STATEMENTS ON IRAQ
PREPARED FOR REP. HENRY A. WAXMAN

Number of Misleading Statements.

The Iraq on the Record database contains
237 misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq that were made by
President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell,
and National Security Advisor Rice. These statements were made in 125 separate
appearances, consisting of 40 speeches, 26 press conferences and briefings, 53
interviews, 4 written statements, and 2 congressional testimonies. Most of the
statements in the database were misleading because they expressed certainty
where none existed or failed to acknowledge the doubts of intelligence officials.
Ten of the statements were simply false.

Timing of the Statements.

The statements began at least a year before the commencement of hostilities in Iraq, when Vice President Cheney stated on March 17, 2002: “We know they have biological and chemical weapons.” The Administration’s misleading statements continued through January 22, 2004,
when Vice President Cheney insisted: “there’s overwhelming evidence that there
was a connection between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government.” Most of the
misleading statements about Iraq — 161 statements — were made prior to the
start of the war. But 76 misleading statements were made by the five
Administration officials after the start of the war to justify the decision to go to war.

Oh yeh’ Heehehehehehehehehe

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Senator Wyden: Wants Review Of Rumsfeld’s Testimony To Congress

By- Suzie-Q @ 7:00 AM MST

From: TPM Muckraker

Sen. Wyden: Rumsfeld Should Be Held Accountable

By Kate Klonick – June 5, 2008, 4:34PM

As we’ve been reporting, Phase II of the Senate intel committee’s report on pre-war intelligence on Iraq has been released, and all day lawmakers have been issuing statements of shock and incredulity.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a member of the authoring Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, called today for a review of whether then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s testimony to Congress was true, given the information in the report.

Specifically cited are quotes from Rumfeld’s testimony to the House Armed Services Committee on September 18 and 19, 2002:

They now have massive tunneling systems… They’ve got all kinds of thing that have happened in the period when the inspectors have been out. So the problem is greater today. And the regime that exists today in the U.N. is one that has far fewer teeth than the one you are describing.
— Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Testimony before the House Armed Services Committiee, September 18, 2002Even the most intrusive inspection regime would have difficulty getting at all of [Saddam Hussein’s] weapons of mass destruction. Many of his WMD capabilities are mobile; they can be hidden from inspectors no matter how intrusive. He has vast underground networks and facilities and sophisticated denial and deception techniques
— Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Testimony before the House Armed Services Committiee, September 18, 2002

[W]e simply do not know where all or even a large portion of Iraq’s WMD facilities are. We do know where a fraction of them are. . .[O]f the facilities we do know, not all are vulnerable to attack from the air. A good many are underground and deeply buried. . .
— Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Testimony before the House Armed Services Committiee, September 19, 2002.

On page 50 the report states it’s conclusion after investigating these statements from Rumsfeld:

The Secretary of Defense’s statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information. [Emphasis ours.]

Wyden had a thing or two to say about Rumfeld’s “not substantiated” testimony:

This is stunning: the Secretary of Defense, testifying before Congress about whether or not ground forces would be strategically necessary in a war against Iraq, said that the Executive Branch “knew” something that it did not know.The intelligence available at the time made this clear, and two months later a report prepared specifically for Secretary Rumsfeld directly contradicted what he told the Committee. As far as I know, neither Rumsfeld nor anyone else from his office made any attempt to contact the Committee and correct the public record, and the result was that Congress and the American people were misled on a question of the utmost importance. I do not think that this is a matter that Congress can afford to ignore and I hope that the Armed Services Committee will take a serious look at Secretary Rumsfeld’s statements.

We’ll be bringing you more from Phase II, but please, keep your comments and observations coming.

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Countdown: Bush Endless Lies Edition!

GEF @ 6:08 AM MST

Americans need to pay close attention to this video so that they can see the truth about George W. Bush and his Administration so that we don’t make the same mistake with OBAMA, HILLARY or McCAIN.

Countdown’s Bushed!: Who, Me Lie? Version

by C&L

VIDEO–>

Honesty and the Bush administration are twains that never shall meet, if this installment of Bushed! is an indication.

Our first scandal is an oldie but goodie.  Rep. Henry Waxman has recently come into possession of an edited version of the  FBI interview with Scooter Libby and whaddya know?  It turns out that maybe–just maybe–Dick Cheney did tell Scooter Libby to leak the name of Valerie Plame to the press.

Next up is the news that the judge in the Guantanamo trial of a Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, has been replaced, for reasons “completely unrelated” to the fact that he threatened to suspend the proceedings over the government’s reluctance to release paperwork necessary to Khadr’s defense team.  Right, I’m sure it is completely unrelated.  Say, how successful terrorism trials can the Bush administration count?

And finally, there is the Man In The Oval Office himself.  After likening Democratic nominee Barack Obama to a Nazi appeaser for daring to say that he would meet with and speak to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he finds himself in an awkward spot, seeing as his man in Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki is doing just that as well, in an effort to strengthen economic and diplomatic ties between the two countries.   Oops!

That’s correct, by Mr. Bush’s definition, his man in Iraq, for whose government 4,100 Americans have died, is himself the equivalent of a Nazi appeaser.

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Whether to Achieve Victory in Iraq or “Surrender”

Sudhan @09:05 CET

by: Camillo “Mac” Bica, t r u t h o u t, June 5, 2008 | Perspective

In the wake of Scott McClellan’s scathing indictment of the Bush regime’s sprint to war, some administration pundits argue that to continue to debate why and how our country went to war some five years ago is a distraction from the more crucial issues at hand. The details and minutia of the complex decision to invade Iraq is better left to the historians to untangle. Rather, we should concentrate our efforts and attention on how best to capitalize upon the more recent “successes” of the “new” military strategy in Iraq.

Even were such optimism regarding the surge warranted, however, what these pundits fail to realize, is that military success and improved strategy does not of itself afford a moral and legal basis for continuing the occupation. Understanding how and why we invaded Iraq is relevant not only to ensure the accuracy of the historical record but, more importantly, to decide whether to continue the occupation in the hope or achieving a yet to be defined “victory,” or in the words of John McCain, to “surrender,” accept defeat and withdraw.

Civilized nations and individuals accept, at least theoretically, that human beings have inalienable human rights – among them the right to life and to live in a nation that enjoys political sovereignty and territorial integrity (sometimes referred to as national rights). Such rights are the basis of “noncombatancy,” and provide a natural immunity from, among other things, being injured and killed unjustifiably and having one’s nation invaded and occupied without warrant. To kill an innocent person, a noncombatant, is murder, and “the (unprovoked and unjustified) invasion or attack by the armed forces of a State of the territory of another State, or any military occupation, however temporary, resulting from such invasion or attack” is aggression.

Continued . . .

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