"It was a completely unnecessary war. It was an unjust war," said Carter, the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize winner. "It was initiated on the basis of false pretenses. All of those are true, but we can't just pre-emptively withdraw..."
He urged the Bush administration to bring home as many troops as possible within the next 12 months...
***Bruuuuuuuuce!
The Boss, Bruce Springsteen, is lending his talents to help the Big Easy. USA Today says: ...The Boss hits the Big Easy on April 30 with much of the ensemble that recorded his upcoming We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, rootsy folk and Americana songs popularized by folk dean Pete Seeger..
****Speaking of music-- ABC News is reporting that Tim McGraw and Faith Hill are expressing their feeling about the Katrina cleanup: Here is an excerpt: Faith Hill and Tim McGraw — two stars who usually stay out of politics — blasted the Hurricane Katrina cleanup effort, with Hill calling the slow progress in Louisiana and Mississippi "embarrassing" and "humiliating."
"To me, there's a lot of politics being played and a lot of people trying to put people in bad positions in order to further their agendas," McGraw, a 38-year-old native of Delhi, La., told ABC News Radio.
"When you have people dying because they're poor and black or poor and white, or because of whatever they are — if that's a number on a political scale — then that is the most wrong thing. That erases everything that's great about our country."
McGraw specifically criticized President Bush. "There's no reason why someone can't go down there who's supposed to be the leader of the free world … and say, 'I'm giving you a job to do and I'm not leaving here until it's done. And you're held accountable, and you're held accountable, and you're held accountable...."
***Do you think that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh could have an entire show without saying the word "liberal?" Why do they continue to demonize the word? I'm proud to be a liberal because it shows that I care about people. Hannity and Limbaugh are just self-centered jerks who repeat the Republican mantra over and over again. And they say Democrats don't have any new ideas???? How many months did Hannity mention the missing girl in Aruba rather than discuss real issues---like Katrina, unemployment, the war, etc.???*Poor Tom "coingate" Noe can't go judge shopping. According to the Toledo Blade, Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Moyer rejected Noe's plea to have his trial out of Lucas County, Ohio.
*Ohio Republicans Are Continuing The Culture of Corruption (Haven't these guys learned anything?):
Also, from the Blade: A bill created by Ohio Republicans allows more political corruption in the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation. Despite the fact that we've had all these coingate scandals, this Ohio GOP controlled state will allow it to continue.
....The bill also rolls back a rule enacted by the BWC Oversight Commission that prohibited investment managers and others seeking to do business with the bureau from contributing more than $250 to statewide elected officials. The move raises that cap to $1,000 in line with existing Ohio law.
“You could have knocked me over with a feather that we would this quickly move to override the decision of our oversight commission on something as fundamental as political influence,” said Sen. Eric Fingerhut (D., Cleveland), a commission member.
“I would never have believed it in a million years,” he said. “It sends a message we don’t want the oversight commission to be zealous in its duties, that we don’t want to get to the root of these problems.”
The bureau has lost an estimated $228 million in a risky offshore hedge fund and a failed rare-coin fund investment with GOP fund-raiser Tom Noe, which was first reported in The Blade in April, 2005...
