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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The Super Tuesday primaries were a test of strength that demonstrated weaknesses in both parties and pointed to problems each could confront in the fall.
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AP photo / Khalid Mohammed
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By Scott Ritter — The former U.N. weapons inspector examines the president’s claims about the “surge” and says what the media and Congress won’t: It is not a strategy, it is an escalation, one that will not prevent the coming collapse of Iraq. There are no solutions just waiting to be found, and the only sensible thing to do is leave. Now.
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By Marie Cocco — George W. Bush has little, if any, credibility left, but he should be taken seriously as he commits the United States to the long-term occupation of Iraq.
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AP photo / Khalid Mohammed
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The two suicide bombers who carried out the attacks that killed 91 people in crowded Baghdad animal markets were mentally challenged women with Down’s syndrome, according to Iraqi military officials. The women reportedly had been strapped with explosives that were activated via remote control.
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By Aaron Glantz — When young American men and women sign up to serve in our military, the government makes them a basic promise: If they are wounded in the line of duty, they will get the care they need. But for far too many, that’s a promise that only exists on paper—even months after the news emerged about American vets’ shameful treatment at U.S. military facilities.
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A commission set up by Congress in 2005 to examine the readiness of National Guard and reserve units has found that they’re simply inadequate to the task of dealing with a major disaster in the United States. The commission blamed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the Pentagon’s assumption that training for those conflicts would somehow prepare troops for disaster relief at home.
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AP photo / Karim Kadim
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Two separate bomb blasts claimed 64 lives in Baghdad on Friday and injured more than 100 others—a tragic reminder of the serious and ongoing challenge of containing large-scale violence in Iraq’s volatile capital city.
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With mere days left before Super Tuesday and down to just two candidates, Thursday’s Democratic debate in Los Angeles gave voters a crucial eleventh-hour look at Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who kept things friendly enough while staking out their differences on several key issues—health care, the economy and, most importantly, the Iraq war.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — If the Arizona senator secures the Republican presidential nomination, his victory would signal a revolution in American politics—a divorce, after a 28-year marriage, between the Republican and conservative establishments.
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By Eugene Robinson — Now that the presidential field has been winnowed to four—barring a miraculous return by one of the contestants recently voted off the island—the new national pastime is gaming the electability factor.
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The number of active-duty soldiers who kill themselves or attempt to is the highest it’s been since the Army began keeping records almost 30 years ago. Three hundred fifty soldiers attempted suicide or injured themselves in 2002, compared with 2,100 in 2007.
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By Marie Cocco — Bush may be a lame duck, but he’s also a president who has shown an unparalleled capacity to blow it.
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There were some heated exchanges in Wednesday’s debate between the Republican candidates. John McCain and Mitt Romney argued about who wanted to stay in Iraq longer and Ron Paul won a round of applause when he said the front-runners were bickering over “technicalities” while their war bankrupts the country.
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Last week at the gates of the mercenary company Blackwater, nonviolent protesters who re-enacted an infamous Blackwater shooting were arrested. As “Blackwater” author Jeremy Scahill notes: “The arrest of the activists and the subsequent five days they spent locked up in jail is more punishment than any Blackwater mercenaries have received for their deadly actions against Iraqi civilians.”
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msnbc.com
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Joe Lieberman, an “Independent Democrat,” staunchly supports the Iraq war, has voted to throw away billions on defense boondoggles, generally gravitates toward all things Republican and has endorsed GOP presidential candidate John McCain, but he draws the line at running alongside McCain as a vice president candidate. Lieberman says that if asked to join a ticket, he would tell McCain, “You can find much better.” For once, Joe, we agree with you.
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George W. Bush, the president who lied America into a war that will end up costing trillions of dollars, scolded the Democratic-controlled Congress in his final State of the Union address on Monday for undermining “the people’s trust in their government” with too many pet projects. Now that’s chutzpah, coming from a man who never met a spending bill he didn’t like unless it had to do with stem cells and sick children.
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Tab, The Calgary Sun —
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He’s not exactly clear on this point, but what Sen. John McCain doesn’t achieve through specificity he drives home through sheer repetition: America can expect “other wars” in the future. In this clip he delivers that warning to his “friends” at a campaign stop in Florida.
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Sometimes it’s useful to let a story’s own lead speak for itself. Take, for example, the doozy of a question that opens Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s New York Times article about Bush’s economic focus in Monday’s State of the Union address: “Will George W. Bush be remembered as the president who lost the economy while trying to win a war?”
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cbsnews.com
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George Piro, the FBI agent who spent nearly seven months interrogating Saddam Hussein, tells “60 Minutes” that the late Iraqi leader didn’t think the U.S. would actually invade and didn’t deny having weapons of mass destruction in order to intimidate Iran. “He told me he initially miscalculated ... President Bush’s intentions,” Piro revealed in the interview, which airs this Sunday.
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overspun.com
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President Bush’s new budget will not fully fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, the White House plans to ask for “bridge” funds—enough to pay for the wars until the next president takes over. Though no official figure has been given, congressional estimates put the amount at less than half of what we spend on the wars in a year.
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merip.org
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The Center for Public Integrity has launched a new Web site that documents some of the 935 “false statements” that George W. Bush and his seven hawks made while pushing war with Iraq. The site endeavors to show that this wasn’t a case of just getting it wrong, but “a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation.”
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cnn.com
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On the same day that the Clinton campaign premiered a new attack ad in South Carolina, former President Bill Clinton tried to blame the Obama campaign and the media for heating up the rhetoric. Bill has been dispatched to South Carolina to hold the line against Obama while Hillary shores up support around the country.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — John McCain is feared by Democrats and liked by independents. That, paradoxically, is why he may yet be rejected by Republicans, even though he has bent over backward to satisfy conservative demands.
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AP photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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Director Oliver Stone has already demonstrated his penchant for making movies about controversial figures and critical moments in world history, so it should come as no surprise that Stone is turning his lens on George W. Bush for his next film, simply and succinctly called “Bush.”
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By Joe Conason — As America marks the first anniversary of the troop escalation in Iraq, at least one thing has become clear. Although the “surge” is failing as policy, it seems to be succeeding as propaganda.
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AP photo / David Guttenfelder
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By Scott Ritter — Pervez Musharraf’s recent actions remind us, Ritter argues, that America’s special relationship with Pakistan serves neither country’s best interests.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The turmoil in the Republican presidential contest, which seems to produce a new front-runner every month, owes to President Bush’s unpopularity and the fact that even members of his own party want to turn the page on the last seven years.
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By Eugene Robinson — It turns out that Toni Morrison’s famous line about Bill Clinton as “our first black president” was just a bon mot. If the Clintons took it as a sign of African-Americans’ unconditional fealty, they were mistaken.
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AP photo / David Furst, pool
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By Chris Hedges — The Gilbert and Sullivan charade of statesmanship played out by George W. Bush and his enabler, Condoleezza Rice, as they wander the Middle East is a fitting end to seven years of misrule.
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bbc.co.uk
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The disgrace brought on the U.S. by members of the military who participated in the abuse of prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison will likely linger for some time, but one of the key Army figures involved in the case, Lt. Col. Steven Jordan (pictured), has been cleared of any serious charges from the 2003 scandal.
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By Andy Borowitz — The humorist looks into his crystal ball and tells us what to expect from the candidates, George W. Bush and even Monica Lewinsky.
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The BBC takes a look at the documentary “No End in Sight,” which features Bush administration insiders who offer a behind-the-scenes look at the incompetent invasion and occupation of Iraq.
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The questionable actions of Blackwater Worldwide are coming back to haunt the private security contractor once again, this time regarding an incident in May 2005. In that incident Blackwater teams on the ground and in the air near a busy Green Zone checkpoint released CS gas, which is used by the U.S. military only sparingly and only in strictly controlled circumstances. The gas temporarily compromised American troops’ ability to maintain security in the area.
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AP photo / Hadi Mizban
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The tragic task of tallying the number of Iraqis who have been killed in the war has been attempted by various parties with vastly different results, largely because of built-in logistical issues, and now the WHO’s health ministry has released its own figures while acknowledging the impossibility of precision.
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AP photo / Steven Senne
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By Bill Boyarsky — As the candidates press forward in the final hours before the state’s primary, the war and health care stand as prime issues. But no one is fully facing up to the fact that the latter cannot be properly addressed as long as the U.S. is paying for the former.
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AP photo / Jim Cole
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By Chris Hedges — Why isn’t Dennis Kucinich treated as a viable candidate? Because, Hedges argues, it’s all too easy for the comfortable to dismiss him.
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AP photo / Doug Dreyer
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One-time presidential candidate and former Sen. George McGovern penned a bombshell of an Op-Ed piece in Sunday’s Washington Post, asserting that the case for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney “is far stronger than was the case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election.”
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When asked in a New Hampshire town hall meeting about the possibility of being in Iraq for 50 more years, John McCain says it could be 100 years and that would be “fine with me” so long as American troops aren’t getting killed. Comparing Iraq to South Korea and Japan, McCain suggests it would behoove America to maintain a long-term military presence there.
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By Bill Boyarsky — Just as the Iowa caucuses were hitting their boiling point, Truthdig’s indefatigable campaign correspondent Bill Boyarsky high-tailed it to New Hampshire to check out the next electoral battleground. Here he takes stock of the frenetic scene he just left and looks to the future of political reporting.
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By Joe Conason — A presidential run by the New York mayor would be a monument to egotism. Even worse, it might prevent the nation from ridding itself of today’s destructive policies.
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By Marie Cocco — If we seemed doomed to refight the battles from eight years ago, perhaps it’s because Al Gore’s warnings about a Bush presidency turned out to be so prescient.
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AP photo / Charlie Niebergall
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When it comes to setting an exact timetable for withdrawing American forces from Iraq, some Democratic candidates are more forthcoming with the details than others. Take John Edwards, for example, who told The New York Times about his ambitious plan to bring nearly all U.S. troops home within 10 months if he is elected president.
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AP photo / Dusan Vranic
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By Scott Ritter — From Hillary Clinton to Mitt Romney, the candidates have no shortage of solutions for the Iraq mess, but their shallow rhetoric reveals an ignorance of the increasingly fractured and disastrous reality.
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The same Tayaran Square market in Baghdad that has witnessed so much bloodshed over the last few years has once again been bombed, injuring dozens and killing at least 14. The attack, which occurred after Friday prayers when the market was crowded, took place just across the Tigris from the Green Zone.
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It’s been a rough year for the Middle East, from Saddam’s hanging to mass killings in Iraq and the war of words over Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. The Mosaic Intelligence Report takes a look back and asks whether there is hope for the future.
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Of the 750,000 or so veterans who have been discharged from the “war on terror,” roughly one-quarter have been recognized by the VA as mentally or physically injured. One of the leading debilitating injuries suffered by those men and women is PTSD, but how much they’re compensated by the government depends a great deal on where they live, according to an investigation by McClatchy’s Washington bureau.
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cnn.com
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The House has followed in the wake of the Senate, saying yes to $70 billion in funds for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Anti-war Democrats have had little success overcoming Republican filibusters and a publicity blitz meant to sell the “surge.”
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