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"The less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag." -- Kin Hubbard
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The many REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL after Election Day 2008
After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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Bush gung ho about colombia
We've got a new president and a new Congress, but one thing hasn't changed: we're still stuck with a foreign-policy mess that's sinking our country ever deeper into Colombia's civil war.
For years, the elitist Colombian government has been fighting peasant insurgents in the south, using its own corrupt military, plus atrocity-committing paramilitary thugs, to try to defeat the guerrillas. Both sides of the civil war are being subsidized by billions in drug-trafficking dollars.
The peasant guerrillas have been winning, so last year Bill Clinton and the U.S. Congress sent $1.3 billion of our tax money to Bogota, buying attack helicopters for the Colombian military and putting 250 U.S. troops on the ground as "trainers."
Our new president is an even bigger booster of protecting the elites in Bogota. Clinton pretended that U.S. aid was only to be used to stop the drug trafficking, not to intervene in the civil war. Bush appears inclined to chuck this nicety and put our troops and money directly into the civil war. His advisors are talking in terms of an additional $2.5 billion tax dollars to be dumped into the failing military efforts in Colombia.
"Our aid will help the Colombian government protect its people," Bush declared in a speech, apparently ignorant of the fact that the government happens to be using our aid to kill its people, not protect them.