HoustonChronicle.com - One out of four Bubbas in Texas lack health insurance

Little surprise to those who follow the rising costs of health insurance in the US. It won't be long before Bill Clinton's largely condemned attempt to introduce legislation on universal health care will be cited as "visionary". In reality, it didn't take a lot of vision to see it coming, but it did require a lot of attention to the facts to get around the AMA's and the Medias' big lies.

Speaking of big lies, from the same article:

"Americans' disposable incomes, or what's left after taxes, also rose 0.9 percent in August after a 1.5 percent jump the previous month. The government credited the increase to President Bush's tax cut, which lowered federal tax withholding. "

Yep, disposable incomes jumped, but only for the very rich. Everyone else, especially the newly unemployed, lost bigtime. Too bad the chron was too Bubba to point this one out.

The Victoria Advocate: "It is an opportunity of a lifetime,' Buchanek said. 'The only police force the Iraqi people have known is one of oppression. If they even think you are guilty of something, they throw you in jail or kill you.'

Officials from Dyncorp, the private company given the contract to hire the officers, notified Buchanek on Sept. 19 asking for verbal confirmation that he still wanted to make the trip."

In my home town, a guy from the police, under guise of "helping out Iraq", is furthering the privatization of the police force. The age of "rent-a-cop" and "robocop"-style corporate governance is here!

A Confident Schwarzenegger Steps Up Attacks on Davis: "Sticking with combat metaphors, Mr. Schwarzenegger said that Mr. Davis was a captain who had led his ship aground and that the final days of the campaign were sure to be bloody ones.

'Let me just now tell you something, this is now hand-to-hand combat, we are in the trenches, this is war,' he told a crowd of 2,000 in a hangar here this afternoon. 'Desperate Davis is going to do all kinds of tricks. He's going to start a dirty campaign now. We know how he is.'"

Bubba Arnold is counting on his Bubba followers to ignore the irony of his using particularly dirtly campaign tactics himself while, at the same time, claiming that Davil "is going to start". My question: when will Arnold start talking about his platform?

HoustonChronicle.com - Lieberman attacks Clark for GOP ties: "Lieberman attacks Clark for GOP ties"

That's right: Bubba Lieberman, who is probably much further to the right than Clark, attacks Clark for this "ties". How's that for the pot calling the kettle black?

HoustonChronicle.com - Bubba-style Upbringing leads to Death of a 3-year old: "The boy's 5-year-old sister tearfully testified that [Bubba] Lockett grabbed him by the throat, forced him against the wall and threw him on a couch. The child stopped breathing after falling to the floor, she said.

Photos of the boy's body showed hundreds of wounds from whippings with belts and phone cords. Wisner said Lockett even forced the boy to drink out of a toilet. "

Now there you go. It's true that lots of Bubbas eschew bottled water, but this Bubba even thought that drinking out of the toilet was fine for a 3-year old. Little surprise that he finally killed him.

Bubba Justice (washingtonpost.com): "Defense attorneys for alleged Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui are urging a federal judge to dismiss the case against him, saying [...] that the government's refusal to produce key al Qaeda witnesses would prevent him from getting a fair trial.

[...]

[...] the government probably would move the case to a military tribunal, where the rules of evidence are more lenient. "

Now here is a classic understatement. In the case that Moussaoui's defense manages to have the case dismissed because of Bubba Bush's Administration's refusal to produce witnesses, Bubba Bush will simply move the case to the military. How's that for summary justice? After all, he's French, isn't he?

Gallup Poll: Bubba Logic Leads US Opinions: "Despite no evidence thus far to support a direct link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks, public opinion polls have shown the public widely believing that Saddam Hussein was somehow connected with these attacks.[ ...] a Washington Post poll showed that almost 7 in 10 Americans thought it likely that Saddam was involved in the attacks.

[...] the weekend CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll shows that close to half of Americans nevertheless continue believe that Saddam was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. This is down only 8 points since the last asking, just before the Iraq war started in March"

What's missing in this poll is some good correlation data such as "Do you believe that the US government has made contact with extraterrestrials?"

Baghdad Residents Polled Favor Chirac Over Blair/Bush: "The results, which have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, showed that Iraqis in the capital still maintained a great deal of skepticism about the motives of the United States and Britain, and residents said they held France and its president, Jacques Chirac, in higher regard than President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, who supported the American military action.

Mr. Chirac's favorability rating was 42 percent to Mr. Bush's 29 percent and Mr. Blair's 20 percent."

I'd say that sums up a lot about how Iraqis feel about their occupational government. They know that Bush and Blair are Bubbas!

Online NewsHour: The Cost of War -- September 22, 2003: "BUBBA PERLE: ... I find it a bit ironic to listen to someone say there's no electricity, there's no water, therefore we must not spend money on electricity and water. What we are attempting to do in Iraq is precisely restore essential services, as Ambassador Bremer indicated, provide security, and open the way to a decent Iraqi government and a private Iraqi economy.

MEDEA BENJAMIN: But we haven't been able to do it in six months.

RICHARD PERLE: Of course it can't be done in six months, no one is proposing that it could be done in six months-- "

For once we see confrontation in the US media, albeit not the mainstream. Unlike FOX and CNN, PBS does try to find balance in its newscasts. It is unfortunate that Medea Benjamin repeats herself a bit too much, but still the point gets across and Bubba Perle is shown to be the phony that he is. The credibility of his assertions is clearly put to a strain.

Has the US media finally gotten up the courage to point out the Bubbas in the Bush administration?

(Thanks to cursor.org for the link.)

FT.com / Bush returns to UN with defiance: "Yet this year Mr Bush shows no signs of changing his defiant tune. The US president will remind the UN that the Security Council threatened 'serious consequences' if Iraq failed to comply with its international commitments and that, when the UN failed to enforce those consequences, the US took on the task.

Mr Bush said in an interview with Fox News, due to be aired on Monday night, that he would tell the UN on Tuesday that he 'made the right decision and the others that joined us made the right decision' in waging war in Iraq. Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, previewed the speech on Monday, emphasising how much the world has improved now that a 'brutal dictator' has been removed from power."

Now there's Bubba Condi in action, synchro with Bubba Jr. Bush. Let's see: Bush praises the UN in 2002, but then goes the unilateral (Aznar+Blair do not equal Spain+UK) don't-submit-the-resolution route, kills thousands of Iraqis, litters the cities and countryside with cluster bombs and uranium dust, picks up the bad habit of shooting civilians whenever things get a little rough, has yet to restore order/economy/jobs, looks at selling off Iraqi industry to foreigners and then Bubba Condi comes along to say "gee, don't we feel better now?"

The Bubba Bush administration has made a shambles of international order and Kofi Annan is pointing this out with vigour and reserve at the same time.

Volatility from Paris: "Smart Bubbas"

Now this one is tough for me because Andrew is a smart guy and puts a lot of thought into his posts.

So maybe this one can be chalked up to a "Everyone will be a bubba for 15 minutes." Some people (and I don't mean Andrew) seem to want to exceed that 15 minutes by an awful lot.

Anyway, Andrew suggests that the real underlying problem in French/US relations is the implicit "I told you so" that underlies all French politics. He goes on to agree with Friedman that the French tactic is simply to block US initiatives.

And there you go: bubba in action. Replace intelligent discourse and careful argument with gross generalizations and unfounded conclusions. The slippery slope into Coulter/O'Reilly territory.

So the reason that the Bush administration has the "big hate" agenda is just that France is annoying and contrarian? What about the rule of international law, multilateralism, sovereignity? What about the democratic process at the UN? Aren't these the standards that the French diplomatic process was trying to uphold? Wasn't Chirac's position that "war is always the worst solution because of the toll in human life"?

And was France alone in espousing these values? Wasn't just about 80% of the world on these same lines, with historically large protest marches around the world? Why is this "France against the US" when it seems that France was simply a much more vocal component of a majority of the world's opinion.

So, of course the Bush administration must make an object lesson out of the "vassal" state that tries to stake claims to international law and order. No "vassal" must get in the way of the neocon manifest destiny (oil, markets, reduced taxes). Bush must put France out in the cold in order to show other vassal states what happens when you get out of your designated place. That's the clear and obvious reason for the Bush response.

But with more blogs like Andrew's giving credence to the "France is just annoying" line, the real story is hidden. Good thing that there are others like "bubbalogic" to set him straight and, at the same time, improve his google ranking by linking to it. :(

Democrats and Nation-Building (washingtonpost.com): "The French have made their condition for support -- and without France no U.N. resolution can be passed -- the transfer of power to a provisional Iraqi authority within a month, followed by elections, the full transfer of sovereignty and presumably the evacuation of the Anglo-Saxons by spring.

This ridiculous timetable is a transparent attempt simply to get America out at the cost of undermining the entire reconstruction effort. Such a proposal will do nothing for Iraq but guarantee chaos. Civil society, industrial infrastructure and the economy were wrecked by Hussein. Iraq needs at least a modicum of rebuilding before even a coherent and unified government could hope to rule effectively -- let alone the current Governing Council, which is indeed representative but for that very reason still divided, unused to compromise and therefore not ready to govern. "

Bubba Krauthammer says "no way, that French condition is not serious". But if the UN takes over, develops a real coalition of nations to rebuild Iraq, the US won't have to pay for it, at least not the majority. Doesn't that sound great?

But wait, there's more. That way, the US soldiers, both career and reservists, will be able to go home and stop being shot at. Now how does that sound?

And do you really believe that the US will get things going in Iraq? Let's see: the US Army two days ago killed 8 Iraqi policemen by mistake. Now how is that for nation building? Really makes you want to be part of the new Iraqi administration!

So, Mein Herr Bubba, what's so unserious about that?

Our War With France: "Bubba Friedman's War Against America"

The NYTimes' columnist Thomas Friedman has more than descended into bubba territory in today's article. Not content with specious arguments alone, Bubba Friedman takes editorial cues from Ann Coulter, adopting a ranting, seething tone, namecalling as a substitute for presentation, diatribe in place of reason. Quintessential bubba.

Lest one accuse me of the same, let's dissect Bubba Friedman's polemical missive.

First paragraph: France wants the US to fail in Iraq because 1) France held the US to a second resolution 2) de Villepin refused to legitimize an idiotic question with an answer 3) France today maintains that the US must cede control to the UN in Iraq.

Here Bubba Friedman resorts to revisionism on four counts. First, France has said repeatedly that war is failure. In this respect, the US has failed. And under any objective criterion (international order, world sentiment, reduction of terrorism, economics, democracy, standard of living in Iraq) the US *has* failed. Same thing for Afghanistan. And if you are honest enough to note that France, like the vast majority of the world, was trying to keep the US from invading Iraq, you would note that almost everyone was trying to keep the US from failing.

Second, France *and* the rest of the world held the US to a second resolution. Sure, the usual crony governments Britain, Spain and Italy went along with Bush, but their citizens did not. There was widespread visible opposition and all polls showed the vast majority sentiment against their governments, up to 90% in Spain. So to single out France as the sole opponent to US requests to avoid a second resolution is a blatant falsehood (i.e. revisionism).

Third, that de Villepin did not answer the ridiculous question "who do you want to win" is itself a ridiculous argument. If you ask me "Who do you want to win: Bush or Gore" I'll tell you "the American people" because I don't care about neither Bush nor Gore. If you say "Bush or Hussein" I'll answer "the Iraqi people". That's the only legitimate answer. Given the choice between being killed by Iraqi secret police under Hussein or by cluster bombs and special-ops under Bush, you would legitimately want another choice.

Fourth, the US should get out of Iraq, if only for its own sake. Sure, Halliburton may get fewer de facto contracts, but our Army is being weakened to a dangerous point by its continued presence in Iraq. The reserves are being taxed beyond any contract that they ever imagined. The American taxpayer is footing the bill, excepting of course the very rich who have received all of the tax breaks. If the UN offered the US a way of getting out of Iraq, sortof a "Get out of Jail Free" card, the US should take it.

After the revisionism, the rest of the article is sheer diatribe: no need to comment.