Subjects the * "Brownwood War Hawks" Are not Talking About !
Mario Castillo killed in Iraq
By Candace Cooksey Fulton -- Brownwood Bulletin
Every Saturday -- without fail -- Maria Castillo's "mejo" called from halfway around the world to tell his mother he was OK. And to make sure she was well, too.
But this weekend there wasn't a call.
Instead, on Friday, two uniformed U.S. Marine officers came to the little house on Victoria Street to tell Guadalupe "Lupe" and Maria Castillo their son, 20-year-old Lance Cpl. Mario Alberto Castillo, had been killed by a roadside bomb at Saulawiyah, Iraq, a city west of Fallalujah.
A 2003 graduate of Brownwood High School, Mario was the baby of the family, and, said his sister, "loved by everyone." Saturday as a stream of visitors stopped by the tiny home, Lupe Castillo would ease himself out of the homemade Adironback chair Mario had made and taken to State in building trades competition in high school, and lead the guests through the house already filled to overflowing with people who had come to offer their condolences to the family. And each new guest, brought a sad reminder to Maria Castillo that her baby, her boy, her "mejo" wasn't coming home alive.
"So many people loved Mario," whispered Maria Castaneda, Lupe Castillo's sister. "Every time Maria sees the people she cries some more. This is very hard on her."
Mario Castillo had decided as a junior in high school he would join the Marines, and, said his sisters, Sonia Sandoval and Julia Rodriguez, as soon as he could after graduating from high school.
source: http://www.brownwoodbulletin.com/articles/2005/06/13/news/news01.txt
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4 Bombings, Other Attacks Kill 10 in Iraq
By PAUL GARWOOD, Associated Press Writer 33 minutes ago
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Four suicide car bombings and other insurgent attacks Monday killed 10 people, and at least 16 Iraqis were wounded after militants opened fire on authorities trying to evacuate the injured from one of the blasts.
The new wave of attacks in Baghdad, Samarra and Tikrit came as radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr met with the Russia ambassador and tribal chiefs from the insurgent hotbeds of Fallujah and Ramadi. Russia and al-Sadr fiercely opposed the war.
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Rep. Walter Jones (news, bio, voting record), R-N.C., said he will join congressmen introducing legislation this week calling for a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.
"When I look at the number of men and women who have been killed — it's almost 1,700 now, in addition to close to 12,000 have been severely wounded — and I just feel that the reason of going in for weapons of mass destruction, the ability of the Iraqis to make a nuclear weapon, that's all been proven that it was never there," Jones, who voted for the war, said Sunday on ABC's "This Week."
"I feel that we've done about as much as we can do," he said.
The four American soldiers attached to Marines units died Saturday in two roadside bombings west of Baghdad, increasing to at least 1,701 the number of U.S. forces who have died in Iraq since the war began in 2003. The number includes five military civilians.
source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050613/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq;_ylt=AuSxlcEUmpkF0UUnWNyX2bys0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA2MTQ3MTFjBHNlYwN0cw--
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Return of the Body Counts
By Mark Benjamin
Salon.com
Saturday 11 June 2005
With Americans souring on the war in Iraq, the US military has started talking up the number of insurgents killed. Are we headed down the same corrupting road we did in Vietnam?
The body counts are back. For the first time since Vietnam, the US military has begun regularly reporting the number of enemy killed in the war zone - in contradiction, apparently, to prior statements by its own top brass.
"Marines Kill 100 Fighters in Sanctuary Near Syria" was a front page headline in the Washington Post last month. The body count, coming from a Marine spokesman, was carried in other major papers that day. What was striking about the factoid, besides the elegantly even number, was that it showed how the US military has increasingly released body counts in reports depicting successful operations in Iraq - despite decrees from the highest levels of the Pentagon, throughout the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, that "we don't do body counts."
As the bloody insurgency continues in Iraq, the US-led counterinsurgency campaign is yielding frustratingly few tangible ways to show progress to the American people. If anything, the insurgency seems firmly entrenched, from reports of its air-conditioned underground bunkers to its own Ho Chi Minh trail. Counting enemy bodies at least offers a number to grab on to, some sense of incremental victory.
Note from Steve: Out thoughts and prayers for those family members and friends who have lost loved ones in this "misguided" military action. Finally, Republicans are beginning to speak up and challenge the direction that our "Neo-Con Republican" War Planners have taken us. I'm sure the "War Hawks" and their Talking Heads (KXYL's James Williamson in particular!) will accuse these fellow Republicans, as they do when it's a Democrat, Independent, or Liberal pointing out the same information, of being Pinko Commi, Ear ring wearing, pagan, ACLU lovin, baby killing, sodomite loving, anti-American, and Christian phobic !
source: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/061205B.shtml
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Army Aims to Catch Up on Recruits in Summer
By Ann Scott Tyson
The Washington Post
Saturday 11 June 2005
Numbers are down for fourth month.
The Army announced yesterday that it missed its recruiting goal for the fourth consecutive month, a deepening manpower crisis that officials said would require a dramatic summer push for recruits if the service is to avoid missing its annual enlistment target for the first time since 1999.
The Army will make a "monumental effort" to bring in the average 10,000 recruits a month required this summer, said Maj. Gen. Michael D. Rochelle, head of the Army's recruiting command. An additional 500 active-duty recruiters will be added in the next two months - on top of an increase of 1,000 earlier this year.
The Pentagon is also considering asking Congress to double the enlistment bonus it can offer to the most-prized recruits - from $20,000 to $40,000 - and to raise the age limit for Army active-duty service from 35 to 40, he said.
"The challenge is one of historic proportions," Rochelle said, acknowledging that he is not sure whether the traditional summer surge in Army recruits will take place, or how large it might be.
Violent, long deployments to Iraq and a sound job market at home have combined to reduce what the Army calls the "propensity to enlist" - the percentage of young Americans willing to consider Army service - which dropped from 11 percent last year to about 7 percent this year.
source: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/061105D.shtml
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Poll: Bush Job Approval Dips to New Low
By Will Lester
The Associated Press
Friday 10 June 2005
Washington - When it comes to public approval, President Bush and Congress are playing "how low can you go." Bush's approval mark is 43 percent, while Congress checks in at 31 percent, an Associated Press-Ipsos poll found. Both are the lowest levels yet for the survey, started in December 2003.
"There's a bad mood in the country, people are out of sorts," said Charles Jones, a presidential scholar and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "Iraq news is daily bad news."
The public also is showing concerns about the direction of the country as the war in Iraq drags on. Only about one-third of adults, 35 percent, said they thought the country was headed in the right direction. Forty-one percent said they supported Bush's handling of the war in Iraq, also a low-water mark.
Gail Thomas, an independent who leans Democratic from Prattville, Ala., said the war in Iraq was a distraction after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack ordered by Osama bin Laden.
"They're not going after the one who did it," said Thomas. "They were too anxious to go after Saddam Hussein. All they're doing is getting our guys killed."
Car bombings and attacks by insurgents killed 80 US troops and more than 700 Iraqis last month. Pentagon officials acknowledge the level of violence is about the same as a year ago, when they were forced to scrap a plan to substantially reduce the US troop presence in Iraq.
While Bush has gotten generally low scores for his handling of domestic issues for many months, Americans have been more supportive of his foreign policy. Not any more.
The poll conducted for AP by Ipsos found 45 percent support Bush's foreign policy, down from 52 percent in March.
David Fultz, a Republican from Venice, Fla., is among those who are sticking with the president.
"In terms of where we're going in the future, President Bush is laying out a plan," said Fultz, an assistant principal at a middle school. "When it's all said and done, we'll be where we want to be. We need to help establish democracy in the Middle East."
Bush's popularity reached its zenith shortly after the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, when various polls found nearly 90 percent approved of the job he was doing. It was close to 80 percent when Ipsos started tracking attitudes about Bush at the start of 2002, and was just over 50 percent when the AP-Ipsos poll was started in December 2003.
Approval for Congress has dipped from the 40s early this year into the low 30s now. A majority of Republicans and Democrats said they don't approve of Congress.
Those figures, combined with Bush's low numbers, could make some lawmakers a little nervous.
"Presidents who are low in the polls have a hard time getting Congress to go along with them," said Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "He has to persuade the people in Congress to follow his legislative agenda and they're all worried about 2006."
Support for Bush's handling of domestic issues remained in the high 30s and low 40s in the latest AP-Ipsos poll.
Thirty-seven percent support Bush's handling of Social Security, while 59 percent disapprove. Those numbers haven't budged after more than four months of the president traveling the country to sell his plan to create private accounts in Social Security. Support for his handling of the economy was at 43 percent.
The low numbers for Congress as an institution don't necessarily spell trouble for all incumbents.
"It's easier to despise an institution than to work up animosity toward an individual lawmaker," said Ross Baker, a Rutgers University political scientist who studies Congress. "The institution is held in low regard, but many of the individual representatives and senators are held in high regard."
The AP-Ipsos poll of 1,001 adults was taken June 6-8 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
source: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/061105F.shtml
On the Net: Ipsos
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* "Brownwood War Hawks" : Talking Heads at KXYL (Brownwood Talk Radio) and their Call-in "Warriors" who continually bash Mexicans, Blacks, Democrats, Gays and Lesbians, Moderate Republicans, etc..
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What are the Brownwood War Hawks not talking about ?
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