Archive for December 30th, 2006
I had to look twice, I thought I was reading the April Fool’s edition of the Buffalo News.
Brown doesn’t hesitate when asked to grade his first year in office. He said he deserves an “A.”
I will give Byron Brown an ’A’ when taxes are down, government is streamlined, restricitive codes and regulations are repealed, businesses want to, and do, locate in the City and employent is up.
Link to Buffalo News - Brown gives himself an ‘A’ after first year as Buffalo mayor
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I put together a slideshow of photos that represent a 2006 year in review. Some of the photos I chose were favorites of the viewers on flickr and some were my choices. I also included photos that represent events from the past year. Click here for a popup slideshow, you might have to enable popups or hold down the shift key. All of the pictures have a connection to Buffalo. Enjoy!
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Many people, including BuffaloPundit, believe that justice was served by the hanging of Saddam Hussein. If this is true, there are others who conspired with Saddam Hussein and deserve the same fate. There are questions that must be answered and not ignored if this whole sordid chapter in our history is to have any real value for the future. Saddam, the Butcher of Baghdad, was created by the United States government. Hussein’s crimes do not stand alone, he was aided and abetted by the United States government.
Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam’s weird trial, forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose our culpability.
And the mass killings we perpetrated in 2003 with our depleted uranium shells and our “bunker buster” bombs and our phosphorous, the murderous post-invasion sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, the hell-disaster of anarchy we unleashed on the Iraqi population in the aftermath of our “victory” - our “mission accomplished” - who will be found guilty of this? Such expiation as we might expect will come, no doubt, in the self-serving memoirs of Blair and Bush, written in comfortable and wealthy retirement.
Saddam, in the face of death, knew that he will be viewed as a martyr.
At first, those who suffered from Saddam’s cruelty will welcome his execution. Hundreds wanted to pull the hangman’s lever. So will many other Kurds and Shia outside Iraq welcome his end. But they - and millions of other Muslims - will remember how he was informed of his death sentence at the dawn of the Eid al-Adha feast, which recalls the would-be sacrifice by Abraham, of his son, a commemoration which even the ghastly Saddam cynically used to celebrate by releasing prisoners from his jails. “Handed over to the Iraqi authorities,” he may have been before his death. But his execution will go down - correctly - as an American affair and time will add its false but lasting gloss to all this - that the West destroyed an Arab leader who no longer obeyed his orders from Washington, that, for all his wrongdoing (and this will be the terrible get-out for Arab historians, this shaving away of his crimes) Saddam died a “martyr” to the will of the new “Crusaders”.
This 1983 photo says it all.
“There are some who, uh, feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is: Bring ‘em on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation. “ - George W. Bush, July 2, 2003.
Here are a few quotes from Riverbend and her local blog in Baghdad. Click the source link to read it all.
End of Another Year…
You know your country is in trouble when:
The UN has to open a special branch just to keep track of the chaos and bloodshed, UNAMI.
Abovementioned branch cannot be run from your country.
The politicians who worked to put your country in this sorry state can no longer be found inside of, or anywhere near, its borders.
The only thing the US and Iran can agree about is the deteriorating state of your nation.
An 8-year war and 13-year blockade are looking like the country’s ‘Golden Years’.
Your country is purportedly ’selling’ 2 million barrels of oil a day, but you are standing in line for 4 hours for black market gasoline for the generator.
For every 5 hours of no electricity, you get one hour of public electricity and then the government announces it’s going to cut back on providing that hour.
Politicians who supported the war spend tv time debating whether it is ’sectarian bloodshed’ or ‘civil war’.
People consider themselves lucky if they can actually identify the corpse of the relative that’s been missing for two weeks.
Bush has effectively created more terrorists in Iraq these last 4 years than Osama could have created in 10 different terrorist camps in the distant hills of Afghanistan. Our children now play games of ’sniper’ and ‘jihadi’, pretending that one hit an American soldier between the eyes and this one overturned a Humvee.
People are being openly shot at check points or in drive by killings… Many colleges have stopped classes. Thousands of Iraqis no longer send their children to school- it’s just not safe.
Had I not chronicled those feelings of agitation in this very blog, I wouldn’t believe them now. Today, they simply represent numbers. 3000 Americans dead over nearly four years? Really? That’s the number of dead Iraqis in less than a month. The Americans had families? Too bad. So do we. So do the corpses in the streets and the ones waiting for identification in the morgue.
Source: Baghdad Burning
