:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 2.16.2007 ::

:: "Murtha Vows To Stop Surge" ::

Antiwar Democrat Says He'll Use Power Of Purse To Restrict Bush
(The Politico) By The Politico's John Bresnahan.
via cbsnews.com

Rep. Jack Murtha, one of the most vocal congressional opponents of the war in Iraq, is vowing to block President Bush’s plan to send another 21,500 U.S. combat troops to Iraq by restricting the administration’s military options in a new wartime spending bill.

“We’re gonna stop this surge,” the Pennsylvania Democrat declared in an interview posted on the Website MoveCongress.org.

Stepping up his campaign against the White House, Murtha, chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, told Tom Andrews, a former congressman-turned-activist, in the online interview that he would attach so many conditions to an upcoming spending bill for Iraq that the Pentagon would not be able to find enough troops to carry out the president’s “surge” plan.

The Andrews group, the Win Without War Coalition, is part of a larger federation of anti-war groups sponsoring the site.

Murtha will oversee the $93 billion supplemental spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan that the House will consider in mid-March. And he wants to impose new restrictions on how the president can deploy combat forces from the United States to Iraq, allow combat veterans to have at least one year stateside before returning to the frontlines and prevent the Pentagon from keeping soldiers and Marines already in Iraq in uniform after their enlistments expire.

“This vote will limit the options of the president and should stop the surge,” Murtha predicted of next month’s floor fight over the wartime supplemental appropriation. “We’re trying to force redeployment [of troops outside Iraq], not by taking money away but by redirecting it.”

Murtha is not pushing a total cutoff of funds for the war in Iraq. But he is considering measure to limit the military actions Bush can take against Iran, although the congressman was more cautious than his statements about Iraq.

“We are looking at the possibility of putting language in the bill that says you can’t go into Iran unless you have authorization [from Congress],” Murtha said.

Murtha also intends to push a provision to bar the creation of permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq and to raze the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

The strategy being employed by Murtha and other House Democratic leaders would force Bush and Republican congressional leaders to accept the new troop restrictions, or face the possibility the supplemental spending bill would falter, thus cutting off all funding for the war.

Read more here.

A L S O


The Democrats After November
by Mike Davis
ZNet.com

Was the November 2006 midterm election an epic political massacre or just a routine midterm brawl? In the week after the Democratic victory, partisan spinmeisters offered opinions as contradictory as those of the protagonists in Rashomon, Kurosawa’s famously relativistic account of rape and murder. On the liberal side, Bob Herbert rejoiced in his New York Times column that the ‘fear-induced anomaly’ of the ‘George W. Bush era’ had ‘all but breathed its last’, while Paul Waldman (Baltimore Sun) announced ‘a big step in the nation’s march to the left’, and George Lakoff (CommonDreams.org) celebrated a victory for ‘progressive values’ and ‘factually accurate, values-based framing’ (whatever that may mean). On the conservative side, the National Review’s Lawrence Kudlow refused to concede even the obvious bloodstains on the steps of Congress: ‘Look at Blue Dog conservative Democratic victories and look at Northeast liberal gop defeats. The changeover in the House may well be a conservative victory, not a liberal one.’ William Safire, although disgusted that the ‘loser left’ had finally won an election, dismissed the result as an ‘average midterm loss’.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 10:30:00 AM [+] ::
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