what did you do in the war, mommy and daddy?

Continuing for a moment in my anti-nuke logic:

First, isn't Hans Bethel an inspiration? But what that clip showed me is the fact that without a sustained effort, without never ceasing concern, in effect, maintenance of the ideal of peace, then things do fall apart.
From searching around on the net it seems that the most informative and nonpartisan website devoted to nukes is the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I'm going to spend some time here... "virtually' educating myself. You should too... You know you could, if you wanted to, and then you'd know the truth about our foreign policy and why I'm so damn mad at us all.

Here is another link to the Monterey Institute of International Studies, Center for Nonproliferation Studies which looks promising as well. People are actually working on peace, the future, diplomacy, all the good things we grew up believing. Look at all the links on that page!

If I, a midwestern housewife, can find these resources in a few minutes, why can't George?
Or, why WON'T George?
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BTW, Anti-war.com is having a fund-raising week. Tip them, will you?
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This link is to the Traprock Peace Center. I gained a lot of solace from reading about a small sane group of people working for peace back when George Dubya was beating his tin drum for war, war, war.
I remember it was one place where I could read the opinions of the U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who has been proved right over and over again, although the GOP corporate media did every thing possible to attempt to smear him.
Their website has grown over the years and can provide anyone who longs for peace with the facts and with ideas to keep hope alive.
What an example.

BTW, a lot of Noam Chomsky on their site... I'm a newcomer to reading him, but it is certainly worth the time. Part of "waking up."
Or, should I say, WAKING UP! Dammit!
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This is the kind of thing that concerns me, and sets off my logic function alarms...

India could make 50 warheads under nuclear deal with Bush
By Justin Huggler in Delhi
Published: 27 July 2006

The US House of Representatives was set to vote yesterday on a nuclear deal with India that threatens to fuel a nuclear arms race in Asia. The deal, a centerpiece of the Bush administration's foreign policy, comes as the US is pressuring Iran and North Korea to halt their nuclear programmes. Under the deal, the US will sell India nuclear fuel and technology for civilian purposes, in exchange for India putting most of its reactors under international safeguards. But a former head of Indian intelligence has said publicly the deal will allow India to produce 50 more nuclear warheads a year than it can now, by freeing up existing uranium reserves for military use.
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Nervous yet?
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I was listening on my mp3 player to Robert Fiske in a recent interview with Amy Goodman:
He'd heard an European commentator remark on BBC about how much 9-11 continues to traumatize America after 5 years.
He said, and I agree, It's time for America to stop being traumatized, time to place 9-11 in context of what was actually happening in the rest of the world.
We keep being told how 9-11 changed the world, he said, I'm not going to let 19 Arab murders change my world and neither should you.
And to allow our government to commit outrageous abuse and torture - means war will not end until we change what we are doing.

Well, when the fox is in charge of the hen house, chaos will reign. And the fox is DEFINITELY in the henhouse.
What was that Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times?

There is another Chinese apocryphal story I'm trying to remember...
(I love Google)
Asked about the historical effect
of the 1789 French Revolution,
Chou En-lai replied:
"Too Soon to Tell."
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And finally, for today...
I'm sure some people are offended by my slurring the Republican voter... calling them morally rehensible sleeping sheep, and so on.
Well, too bad.
I listen to big mouthed rightwingnuts on radio and television calling me bad names.
But, to support my view, get a load of this:

why I call the GOP sheep 'asleep':

Half of U.S. Believes Iraq had WMD
Sunday, Aug. 6, 2006
Reprinted from NewsMax.com

Do you believe in Iraqi "WMD"? Did Saddam Hussein's government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?
Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.

People tend to become "independent of reality" in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.

The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900 million-plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.

Despite this, a Harris Poll released July 21 found that a full 50 percent of U.S. respondents up from 36 percent last year said they believe Iraq did have the forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, an attack whose stated purpose was elimination of supposed WMD. Other polls also have found an enduring American faith in the WMD story.

"I'm flabbergasted," said Michael Massing, a media critic whose writings dissected the largely unquestioning U.S. news reporting on the Bush administration's shaky WMD claims in 2002-03.

"This finding just has to cause despair among those of us who hope for an informed public able to draw reasonable conclusions based on evidence," Massing said.

Timing may explain some of the poll result. Two weeks before the survey, two Republican lawmakers, Pennsylvania's Sen. Rick Santorum (news, bio, voting record) and Michigan's Rep. Peter Hoekstra (news, bio, voting record), released an intelligence report in Washington saying 500 chemical munitions had been collected in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

"I think the Harris Poll was measuring people's surprise at hearing this after being told for so long there were no WMD in the country," said Hoekstra spokesman Jamal Ware.

But the Pentagon and outside experts stressed that these abandoned shells, many found in ones and twos, were 15 years old or more, their chemical contents were degraded, and they were unusable as artillery ordnance. Since the 1990s, such "orphan" munitions, from among 160,000 made by Iraq and destroyed, have turned up on old battlefields and elsewhere in Iraq, ex-inspectors say. In other words, this was no surprise.

"These are not stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction," said Scott Ritter, the ex-Marine who was a U.N. inspector in the 1990s. "They weren't deliberately withheld from inspectors by the Iraqis."

Conservative commentator Deroy Murdock, who trumpeted Hoekstra's announcement in his syndicated column, complained in an interview that the press "didn't give the story the play it deserved." But in some quarters it was headlined.

"Our top story tonight, the nation abuzz today ..." was how Fox News led its report on the old, stray shells. Talk-radio hosts and their callers seized on it. Feedback to blogs grew intense. "Americans are waking up from a distorted reality," read one posting.

Other claims about supposed WMD had preceded this, especially speculation since 2003 that Iraq had secretly shipped WMD abroad. A former Iraqi general's book at best uncorroborated hearsay claimed "56 flights" by jetliners had borne such material to Syria.

But Kull, Massing and others see an influence on opinion that's more sustained than the odd headline.

"I think the Santorum-Hoekstra thing is the latest 'factoid,' but the basic dynamic is the insistent repetition by the Bush administration of the original argument," said John Prados, author of the 2004 book "Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War."

Administration statements still describe Saddam's Iraq as a threat. Despite the official findings, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has allowed only that "perhaps" WMD weren't in Iraq. And Bush himself, since 2003, has repeatedly insisted on one plainly false point: that Saddam rebuffed the U.N. inspectors in 2002, that "he wouldn't let them in," as he said in 2003, and "he chose to deny inspectors," as he said this March.

The facts are that Iraq after a four-year hiatus in cooperating with inspections acceded to the U.N. Security Council's demand and allowed scores of experts to conduct more than 700 inspections of potential weapons sites from Nov. 27, 2002, to March 16, 2003. The inspectors said they could wrap up their work within months. Instead, the U.S. invasion aborted that work.

As recently as May 27, Bush told West Point graduates, "When the United Nations Security Council gave him one final chance to disclose and disarm, or face serious consequences, he refused to take that final opportunity."

"Which isn't true," observed Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a scholar of presidential rhetoric at the University of Pennsylvania. But "it doesn't surprise me when presidents reconstruct reality to make their policies defensible." This president may even have convinced himself it's true, she said.

Americans have heard it. A poll by Kull's WorldPublicOpinion.org found that seven in 10 Americans perceive the administration as still saying Iraq had a WMD program. Combine that rhetoric with simplistic headlines about WMD "finds," and people "assume the issue is still in play," Kull said.

"For some it almost becomes independent of reality and becomes very partisan." The WMD believers are heavily Republican, polls show.

Beyond partisanship, however, people may also feel a need to believe in WMD, the analysts say.

"As perception grows of worsening conditions in Iraq, it may be that Americans are just hoping for more of a solid basis for being in Iraq to begin with," said the Harris Poll's David Krane.

Charles Duelfer, the lead U.S. inspector who announced the negative WMD findings two years ago, has watched uncertainly as TV sound bites, bloggers and politicians try to chip away at "the best factual account," his group's densely detailed, 1,000-page final report.

"It is easy to see what is accepted as truth rapidly morph from one representation to another," he said in an e-mail. "It would be a shame if one effect of the power of the Internet was to undermine any commonly agreed set of facts."

The creative "morphing" goes on.

As Israeli troops and Hezbollah guerrillas battled in Lebanon on July 21, a Fox News segment suggested, with no evidence, yet another destination for the supposed doomsday arms.

"ARE SADDAM HUSSEIN'S WMDS NOW IN HEZBOLLAH'S HANDS?" asked the headline, lingering for long minutes on TV screens in a million American homes.
© 2006 Associated Press.

'Nuff Said.
Just Plain Stupid and Obstinate. I think the wrong party is represented by a donkey.