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Today's Stories June 23, 2006 Col. Dan Smith Iraq: Fool Me Twice June 22, 2006 Marjorie Cohn Friendly Fire Ambush Winslow T. Wheeler Lockheed, the Senator and the F-22 Tanya Reinhart A Week of Israeli Restraint Mike Marqusee The Forest Gate Raid William Blum Why Bush's Iraq is Worse Than Saddam's   June 21, 2006 Ramzy Baroud Zarqawi's Death: Myth vs. Reality Patrick Cockburn Embassy Work as Death Sentence Gary Leupp Making the Case for Impeachment Greg Moses Elite Logic at the Border June 20, 2006 Fred Gardner The Long War on Aspirin Omar Waraich Ode to Joy: Watching Blair Sink Christopher Reed Japan Nixes Payments to Its Wartime Slaves CP Newswire Coca Cola Takes a Hit Jonathan Cook Israel Engineers Another Cover-Up   June 19, 2006 Bill Quigley HUD's Bulldozers and the Poor of New Orleans John Walsh Tears of a Clown: Al Franken's War Mike Whitney The Zoom Lens War: Bush's Baghdad Photo Op Alexander Cockburn The Left and the Blathersphere June 16 / 18, 2006 Weekend Edition Kathy / Bill Christision The Power of the Israel Lobby Joseph Nevins On the Migrant Trail: No More Walls, No More Deaths Farrah Hassen An Interview with Syria's Ambassador to the US, Dr. Imad Moustapha Greg Moses The Real Mission of the Uniformed Ghost at the Border Nicole Colson "There's No Hope at Gitmo" John Scagliotti How MoveOn Wastes Its Donors' Money Mokhiber / Weissmann Corporate Democrats   June 15, 2006 Kathy Kelly Look Them in the Eye: Honest Abe and the Residents of Ramadi Norman Solomon Premature Triangulation: Hillary's Big Problem Ron Jacobs Publicity Stunts as Public Policy Sam Bahour Cover Up on Gaza Beach Ramzy Baroud Palestine on the Brink CounterPunch Wire Death Squads at Colombia's Universities Gabriel Kolko Why a Global Economic Deluge Looms Website of the Day Antje Duvekot: Music You've Been Waiting Years to Hear   June 14, 2006 Nicole Colson "They Want the Fear Level at a High Pitch": An Interview with Lawyer Lynne Stewart Jonathan Cook Israeli Law and Order Joseph Schechla Bulldozing Palestine: an Open Letter to Caterpillar, Inc. Michael Carmichael Bolton at Oxford: Jeered and Taunted Evelyn Pringle Karl and George, the Teflon Partnership Ward Churchill My Trial By Media: Turning Quibbles Over Footnotes into Felonies Rev. William E. Alberts Decoding the Coders of Christ: Jesus the Political Insurgent? Website of the Day Marines Iraq Snuff Film   June 13, 2006 Medea Benjamin Take Back America Suppresses Anti-War Dissenters at HRC Speech Anthony Alessandrini The Evil of Banality: the General, the New York Times and the Gitmo Suicides Paul D'Amato The Meaning of Haditha Dave Lindorff The Strange Death of Zarqawi: Was He Killed So He Wouldn't Talk? John Ross Elections and the World Cup: If Team Mexico Advances, Will Anyone Show Up to Vote for Lopez Obrador? Gabriel Garcia Venezuela and Drug Trafficking: Bush Bashes Chavez Despite Positive Results Hilton Obenzinger DIvestment is a Stand for Equality in Israel Yitzhak Laor The Secret of Authority Juan Antonio Ocasio Rivera Puerto Rico at the UN Jennifer Van Bergen The Story Behind Zarqawi's Death: What's the Legality of the Assassination? Website of the Day Paul Wright: a Real American Freedom Fighter   June 12, 2006 Paul Craig Roberts Bush's Armageddon Wish: a Final End to History? Patrick Cockburn The US Already Misses Zarqawi Mike Marqusee Rebranding a Team: English Nationalism and the World Cup Lee Sustar "I Never Had the American Dream:" Left with No Future by GM and Delphi Robert Fisk Has Racism Invaded Canada? Michael J. Smith Enter Sandman; Exit Kosland Felice Pace NPR's Warped Covereage of the MIddle East Jennifer Loewenstein Setting the Record Straight on Hamas Website of the Day Our Way Home   June 10 / 11, 2006 Weekend Edition Robert Fisk Zarqawi's End is not a Famous Victory Diane Christian Zarqawi's Face Joe Allen The American Way of Atrocities: Marine Corps' Killer Virtues Ralph Nader Let Us All Praise the Dixie Chicks Fred Gardner Tylenol Toxicity Terror Dave Lindorff Nothing New About Haditha Dave Zirin / John Cox Will Racism Spoil the World Cup? Dennis Perrin Death is Patriotic: Necro-Porn, Live on CNN Greg Moses Militarizing the Border: Why Operation Jump Start Worries Me John Chuckman Terror in Toronto or Tempest in a Teapot? Michael J. Smith Babes in Kosland: Dem Blogfest, Day Two Roger Burbach Bachelet in DC: Chilean President Refuses to Back Down to Bush Ira Moskowitz Israeli Court Finds Mad-Dog US Prof Libeled CounterPuncher Neve Gordon Sam Bahour The Gaza Air Strikes: Begging for a Response Seth Sandronsky Grocery Chains and Bush's Ownership Society: Profits Fall, Stores Close Michael Berg A Father's Day Message: Both Parties Have Betrayed America Kirsten Roberts Desmond Dekker and the Music of the Shantytowns Ron Jacobs Who's Fooling Who? Jeffrey St. Clair Playlist: What I'm Listening to This Week Poets' Basement Jones, Davies, Engel and Louise Website of the Weekend Miles and Trane, So What?

June 23, 2006 A Winning Strategy Cut and Run By DAVE LINDORFF The Democrats in Congress are having trouble coming up with a position on the War in Iraq because they are so afraid of Republican charges that they are the "cut and run" party. It's a pathetic spectacle, and they should give it up. The way I see it "cut and run" is the slogan the Democrats should adopt as their own for the 2006 election year. Democrats: the party of cut and run. But I'm not talking about the war. The "cut" should be for cutting the defense budget. It makes no sense for the U.S. to be spending more money than the rest of the world combined on the military. All that taxpayer dough certainly doesn't do anything to combat terrorism. As the insurgents in Iraq are demonstrating daily, all that heavy equipment and those billion-dollar supersonic aircraft, and those guys bundled up like it's the North Pole running around with heavy artillery in their hands aren't doing much about catching guys armed with creaky AK-47s and home-made explosive devices. And they sure aren't catching Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, all that money is just providing excuses for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their gang of yes-men generals to get the country and its out-of-work young men and women into bloody, pointless messes like Iraq. The answer is to take the toys away. Just think what could be done with the $250 billion a year that would be freed up instantly if the $500-billion military budget were cut in half! And it would be easy to do. Close all the bases that are just sitting around the U.S. to give members of Congress places to give 4th of July Day speeches, cancel spending on fancy new weapons programs to fight imaginary enemies, decommission half the soldiers, marines, sailors and pilots on the payroll—and of course bring the troops home from Iraq, not next year but now. (Surely a nation that was still spending half as much as the rest of the world combined wouldn't be at the mercy of anybody, though it might be a little harder to be an out-of-control imperialist bully.) That gets us to the second part of the slogan: the “run” part. And here's where the real fun starts. For the last five years, we've had an administration that has proven it can't run anything. Look at the record: Bush has run the government into the ground, run the military into a ditch, run the nation's international reputation into the sewer, run our schools into crisis, run the budget off the rails, run away from his responsibility to protect the nation, and literally run away from taking the blame for any of his countless mistakes. How inspiring it would be--and what a blessed relief--to have a party that was committed to actually "running" the government for a change. With all the money saved by "cutting" the military budget back to a level appropriate for a nation that is not at war (and in case you haven’t heard, the U.S. is not at war even today, given that the so-called War on Terror is no war at all, the War in Afghanistan is a U.S. effort in which the U.S. is merely a participant there at the invitation of the Afghan government, and the troops currently in Iraq, who would be withdrawn in any case under this proposal, are merely guests of the Iraqi government, serving in a police function to help support the government, which according to the Bush administration, already has over 200,000 of its own troops--ten times the estimated number of rebels, terrorists and criminals opposing it), all things would be possible. Democrats, with all that money saved from "cutting" the military budget, could actually "run" a government. They could provide funding for significantly smaller classroom sizes--the one reform that is guaranteed to improve the nation’s dismal education system. They could restore all the cuts in child welfare programs and rebuild the network of free-access community health clinics that years of Republican and Clintonian cuts have virtually eliminated. They could build a state-of-the-art flood control system to protect New Orleans, and a WPA-like program to help all New Orleans residents get back to their city. They could provide real assistance where it's needed in poor countries of the world that are suffering from lack of sanitation, clean water and basic health care. If the Democrats came back into power and "cut" the massive tax giveaways of the Bush years out of the tax code, they could even do more. They could run the country back out of bankruptcy. They could provide real tax relief where it's needed: those working people who are barely getting by on $30-60,000 a year. They could make serious investments in public transportation to get the country out of polluting and oil-guzzling cars. They could fund research into non-polluting energy alternatives, and into developing a crash program to slow or prevent global warming. The list is almost endless. All the Democrats need to do is adopt a policy of cut and run, and take it to the people of the United States. The first step would be for the American people--the ones who are fed up with the mendacity and rank incompetence of this administration and its backers in Congress--to get of their couches and to demand that the supposed opposition party stop diddling around with deadlines, and get serious about being in opposition. My message for Democrats: Cut the crap. Run like you want to win. Cut the military. Run a real government. Cut and Run. It's a winning slogan.

Now Available from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann Click Here to Order Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair