Another Fine Morning

Dear Sarah Chayes

2007-12-10T12:30:00.000-05:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Chayes
Are you trying (now) to tell us you didn't know back when Dubya was sitting in those photo ops with Hamad Karzai, that he was a warlord?
I don't have a Harvard degree in history, but this midwestern housewife knew.
Gee Whiz.
NPR = conduit for propaganda.

It might be fun wearing a turban in Afganistan but Flint, Michigan is a dangerous place with a depressed population and Flint needs a soap cooperative too. Come to Flint and work here and I won't believe you're another American mole meddling in the rest of the world.
Why do we need to go to the Mideast to do charity work?

nin

2007-11-19T10:47:00.000-05:00

Quoted in The Art of Mental Warfare
"We are like people born in a cage and unable to visualize any world beyond our familiar bars of prejudice and superstition. That opinion the few create in order to control the many has seen to it that we are kept in permanent ignorance of our actual estate."
- Gore Vidal, The Great Unmentionable, Harvard lecture

2007-10-29T09:43:00.001-04:00

I've always liked Jim Hightower

2007-10-24T16:16:00.000-04:00

Now he's making video

Rudy

2007-10-22T09:51:00.001-04:00

2007-10-15T12:55:00.001-04:00

On foreign policy Ron Paul is spot on, but how does he stand on social policy?
Republicans used to have a heart... before the Reagan revolution.

Could you pay this bill? four days in the hospital for almost $40,000 dollars.
I am fortunate, we have an excellent insurance program. Maybe you do, too.
What if we were one of the 45 million Americans who don't have any insurance?
How do we care for "the least among us?"
How do we "love our neighbor?"
What is the definition of the politically used word "compassionate"?

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
-- Dwight Eisenhower

Billions, trillions, soon you're talking about real money. Just not enough for children to be insured.

2007-10-11T08:29:00.000-04:00

priorities

2007-10-08T09:34:00.000-04:00

UPDATE #2:Copied from Tom Paine dot com, I get their daily newsletter and you can, too.

Can't make this stuff up
Submitted by Rick Perlstein
October 4, 2007
As everyone knows by now, our president declared yesterday, Wednesday, to be "National Veto Child Health Day." What you may not know is that the president declared Monday a very special day too:
For Immediate ReleaseOffice of the Press SecretaryOctober 1, 2007
* Child Health Day, 2007 *
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America
Our Nation is committed to the health and well-being of our youth. On Child Health Day, we reaffirm our commitment to helping children develop good nutrition habits and active lifestyles, so that they can grow into healthy and productive adults....Goes on like that for another five paragraphs. Then:
NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim Monday, October 1, 2007, as Child Health Day. I call upon families, schools, child health professionals, faith-based and community organizations, and State and local governments to reach out to our Nation's young people, encourage them to avoid dangerous behavior, and help them make the right choices and achieve their dreams.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this first day of October, in the year of our Lord two thousand seven, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-second.
GEORGE W. BUSH

No, you can't make this stuff up.
Comments included:
Do you think this may have something to do with October being National Sarcasm Month.
Nothing new here folks.
He's been doing this kind of thing since January 2001.
If he visits your factory for a photo-op, get ready to start looking for a new job, because there is always some back-room deal being worked out to screw you.
Same with the school kids. Photo-op on Monday. Wednesday your special ed programs get cut.
Outrage? Certainly. Surprise? Nah.

My comment:
This week's headlines on the American Medical Assoc. News: "Health Insurance premiums up 6.1%, fast outpacing inflation and wages."

The cool graphic is a chart that shows that over the past 6 years health insurance premiums have seen a cumulative growth of 78%* !!! Extrapolate that, folks!*

source: Kaiser Family Foundation Sept. 2007

The Kaiser spokesman said "we are witnessing a slow but certain long-term erosion of our employer -based system." Only 59% of firms with under 200 employees offer health benefits of any kind, down from 68% in 2001.It's a race to the bottom. Trickle down economics is drowning the middle class, and God know what the poor are going through. Page 2 gets worse, as comparisons are made between the increasing premiums for workers and employers using different plans as examples. Of course low wage workers and small business employers are feeling the most pain in trying to meet the rising costs. But, but, but insurance corporation PROFITS are up!
This is criminal, America.

When 'Sicko' comes out on DVD, please get it.Michael Moore may have made you mad in the past, but this time he will make you weep. And, to warn you in advance, in this movie he wasn't even addressing the needs of the uninsured. The things you will see are happening to the insured. This health crisis in America is not the fault of hospitals or doctors, it is the fault of the private insurance corporations and our elected politicians.

By the way, the AMA news writes: "The AMA, as part of the Health Coverage Coalition for the Uninsured, supports offering tax credits for buying health insurance and improving enrollment both in Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program." It's a start.

UPDATE #1:Well, The Compassionate One vetoed the bill. He punishes little children for the sins of their parents ... Being born without a tax free inheritance is just not de rigueur, is it, bunkie?Here's a hint to the Democrats: don't use the language of the Republicans. When they deride socialized medicine, tell them you don't want THAT, but MOST parents would like a little help with their medical INSURANCE. Here's for socialized INSURANCE. It's the least we can do for the least among us.

Both the U.S. House and Senate have voted with overwhelmingbipartisan majorities to give 10 million children health care.
This was welcome news to hard-working families across thecountry who simply can't afford insurance--and can only prayeach night their kids don't get sick or hurt.
President Bush is set to veto the bill, calling this necessaryinvestment in children's health "excessive."
Yet, as he was threatening to kill the bill, Bush announced an additional $200 billion in spending for the war in Iraq.
The president wants to spend as muchin about one month of the war in Iraqas it would cost to cover 10 million childrenfor one year.
Click this http://www.unionvoice.org/ct/md1u3l619ci1/ link to tell President Bush to get his priorities straight.
The overwhelming majority of the House and Senate--not tomention the American public--understands that the StateChildren's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) is vital forchildren and families here at home.
Children enrolled in the SCHIP programare much more likely to have regular doctor visits and have lower rates of unmet needs for medical care.The choice for Bush is simple: veto the bill or give 10 millionchildren a better chance for a healthy life.
Tell Bush to get his priorities straight and sign this bill to provide health care coverage to 10 million children.

Helliburton in Burma, or wherever the pipelines go, you get repression

2007-10-03T09:50:00.000-04:00

For days I've been away from the computer and depending on the television for my news. Gawd. Watching minute clips of monks protesting somethin-or-other in Myanmar. But listening to the MSM, do you think they'd actually EXPLAIN what's going on? (no)
I was wondering if we weren't just watching pretty color film at 11 about another color-coded so-called "revolution" (I hate quotation marks too but I just am inexplicably compelled to use them, ignore and read on, please.)

So today, I get mail:

Dear Activist,

Stand against oppression

I've watched in horror all week.
In Burma, Buddhist monks, marching against tyranny, are reported to have been disrobed and shackled. Many detained, many killed. They marched against injustice and oppression, and their actions were met with a cruel and ruthless crackdown.

You can take a stand against the oppression of these peaceful monks. Take action today.
The death counts vary wildly. But you can be sure that the military junta has brutally beaten and possibly murdered many more than we'll ever be able to confirm.

Please take action today for the people of Burma.
As you know, Amnesty International has been working for decades to protect human rights in Burma (Myanmar) and to support the pro-democracy forces' right to peaceful dissent. When the people of Burma last staged mass pro-democracy protests back in 1988, the military junta murdered thousands. But history does not have to repeat itself."

.... and so on, from Amnesty USA, via Bob Fertig who wrote...

It's been 17 tragic years since Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi was elected prime minister of Burma - only to have the military junta nullify the election and place her under house arrest ever since.
In August, the junta doubled fuel prices and created enormous hardships. The Burmese people have taken to the streets for peaceful protests, but the junta has responded with naked brutality.
Please join me in urging the United Nations Security Council to immediately send a mission to Burma.
Bob Fertik

Then I read this and put 2 + 2 together, it's just like the phony 'war on terror', it's all about them oil pipelines... and Dirty Dick Cheney's Helliburton who always makes a buck dealing with criminal governments, and making business opportunities for the security industry.

Okay, that said, how much of the background story have you heard on the mainstream media? Zip.

Just waiting for someone to ask this question

2007-09-17T13:08:00.000-04:00

Judge Mukasey, you are portrayed as supporting the law. Is that pre-Bush Law, or the shreds that are left?
I keep laughing every time I hear the "he follows the law" meme, without the follow up question.

2007-09-17T11:09:00.000-04:00

If wishes were ponies our religious fundamentalist vampires would get raptured, right now, and leave the earth to the meek who would live in peace. I heard it in the lyrics of a song yesterday while listening to KPFA - the books of the religious are written in letters of blood.

GOP Leader Boehner: U.S. Troop Deaths in Iraq Are a ‘Small Price’ to Pay
www.pensitoreview.com/2007/09/14/gop-leader-boehner-us-iraq-...
Video and Transcript: On CNN Wednesday, House Minority Leader John Boehner told Wolf Blitzer that the loss of U.S. blood and treasure in Iraq is an “investment” and a “small price” to pay if it leads to destroying al Qaeda. His statement not only reveals the GOP's true disdain for the military but is all the more nauseating because it is underpinned by the lie that al Qaeda in Iraq poses a threat to the US.

This Day in Peace History

2007-09-17T09:56:00.001-04:00

September 19, 1952
The United States prevented Charlie Chaplin, the British director, actor and producer, from returning to his Hollywood home until he had been investigated by Immigration Services.
He had been on the FBI's Security Index since 1948, and was one of over 300 people blacklisted by Hollywood film studios. Chaplin was unable to work after refusing to cooperate during his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Informed that he would not necessarily be welcomed back, he retorted, "I wouldn't go back there if Jesus Christ were president," and surrendered his U.S. re-entry permit in Switzerland.

Chaplin’s FBI files:
Charlie Chaplin: "My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them."

This Week in History is a collection designed to help us appreciate the fact that we are part of a rich history advocating peace and social justice. While the entries often focus on large and dramatic events there are so many smaller things done everyday to promote peace and justice.
To the real peace advocates - YOU!
Publisher, Carl Bunin • Editor, Al Frank
from detroit, michigan

follow the thread

2007-09-14T14:30:00.000-04:00

Maher

Pincus

Carter

Zero percent right Bill Kristol but still a 'pundit'

Clinton, "the 9-11 report was a political document"

But Bill! Hill was at AIPAC, Neo-libs serving the same system as the Neo-cons.

Wm Kristol slapdown - and the nation slides toward a draft... as NPR says over and over and over, 'to share the sacrifice'

Chicago Boys - The NeoCons and Leo Strauss AND their counterpart Muslim Brotherhood - the yan for their yin, the peas in a pod who would drag us into a neverending war with each other. Of course, to "save" us... with the added benefit of making a bundle on the side... the MIC flourishes while we get flushed down the drain.

a Long Movie - but wake up! We've seen it before!

This isn't my America.

15 permanent bases (and an embassy city) are reality, the rest is talk...

2007-09-13T08:53:00.000-04:00

That's in Iraq. We couldn't get the hospitals, electricity or water plants working, but we have an Imperial Stormtrooper Star Wars Garrison in the center of the oil puddle of the world.

We have 737(publicly known) military bases in other countries. What for? To make trade free? To spread democracy? To make the world love us?

Chalmers Johnson has said we cannot live as a domestic democracy and an imperial empire at the same time.
Senator Hagel said it... "for What?" ...every death in Iraq from this day forward is "for What?"

During his campaign Dubya wanted us to wait 6 months until the (Consigliere) Baker Commission came up with a plan for Iraq. Then he ignored it.

Then Dubya asked us to wait 6 more months to see if his Surge (Trademark) worked and General Betrayus could recommend a plan.

Dubya is playing out he clock, and meanwhile Congress keeps draining the treasury for him, and China keeps loaning us money for our grandchildren to repay.
Hope you don't think the dollar is going to keep it's value forever.
How's your home's value going? Can you sell it? Do you have a defined benefit pension any more? Our longevity is 41st in the world, our rate of infant mortality is atrocious, and we pay twice as much for medical insurance to cover only half our population.

This is the meaning of the Federalist Society who want to erase the Constitution, the Chicago School of Trickle Down Economics, the National Guard replaced by Blackwater 'Security', and the curse of Grover Norquist. Privatize everything, and shear the sheep at gunpoint. Bread and circuses will entertain the taxpayers while Rome burns.
Cameras and propaganda pointed at our own people.
Democracy or Empire. Too late.

Wake up America, you have ADD if you don't remember this

2007-09-11T10:27:00.001-04:00

... press briefing from 6 months after the Twin Towers were branded into your memory.
So why do you think Bush has done such a great job? If he'd have treated OBL like a common criminal instead of a "terrorist" we might have saved 4,000 lost American lives in Iraq, which had nothing to do with September 11, 2001.

The ultimate parasite met his match... yuck yuck yuck.

September 11, time to buy new school clothes and books and roll out a new campaign to sell the same old product

2007-09-11T07:15:00.000-04:00

This is the day that commemorates the venality and criminality of politicians and religious leaders, made manifest.
Wake up. Six years later, wake up.

Or, better yet, lighten up, America.

Dwelling on your injuries make you sound all whiny and maudlin, and you ruin the party! Your makeup starts running with all those tears! You're ruining your botox treatment! Here's an idea from a great leader... Go SHOPPING!

Be your selfish self and get on with it.
You've had electricity and clean water for the past six years, right?
Have you been tortured or ethnically cleansed?
Are the kids insurgents, yet?
Grow up, America.

The boogey men, OBL and Dubya are two peas from the same pod. Front men for the perpetual war machine, propagandists, chosen by the real movers for their supposed religiosity and their stage presence. Both of them are rich sons of richie riches, playing with blocks and dress up costumes like they were buildings and uniforms. What do they know of anything?

But they scared you out of your wits, didn't they.
They're pretty certain of themselves, aren't they.
Their product has been tested on focus groups.

But I think they are both losing their appeal, and I think their planners are thinking of retiring their dog and pony shows to move on to bigger and brighter shiny new products...
like Iran, and then on to the Road to Damascus.
Fall is the time to roll out the new shows, Andy!

Isn't it interesting how predictably Madison Avenue their productions have become?
It's like watching the summer reruns, only they're 6 years along now. More like watching Gilligan's Island reruns.

Dubya's speeches are worse than bad. He can barely deliver them. (or more correctly, catapult them.) And OBL has lost all credibility, showing up in a funny beard and asking us to embrace Islam, indeed. He really doesn't know us, does he.

Both of them need another speech writer, another makeup man, stand-ins, props and better costumes.
Another terrorist attack, another election, and the seasons, they go round and round and the painted ponies go up and down...

Lucky for their sponsors, they have Congress to pick our pockets and post date their checks...

I plan on buying the book

2007-09-10T17:22:00.000-04:00

Naomi Klein, uncovers the Shock Doctrine

You Got That Right, Bob

2007-08-31T08:23:00.000-04:00

Bob Herbert: Holding Kids Hostage

The governors of New York and New Jersey were upset and not trying to hide it.

“We had zero forewarning,” said New Jersey’s Jon Corzine. “It was sprung at 7:30 on a Friday night in the middle of August, the time when it would draw the least fire.”

He was talking about the Bush administration’s latest effort to thwart the expansion of the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program. Governors in several states are trying to include more youngsters from the lower rungs of the middle class and have vowed to fight the president on this issue.

Acting during a Congressional recess, and making a distinct effort to stay beneath the radar of the news media, the administration enacted insidious new rules that make it much harder for states to bring additional children under the umbrella of the program, known colloquially as CHIP.

The program is popular because it works. It’s cost effective and there is wide bipartisan support for its expansion. But President Bush, locked in an ideological straitjacket, is adamant in his opposition.

In addition to the new rules drastically curtailing the ability of governors to expand local coverage by obtaining waivers from the federal government, the president has threatened a veto of Congressional efforts to fund a more robust version of the overall program.

“It’s stunning,” said New York’s Gov. Eliot Spitzer. “He says he’s going to veto health care for kids because it’s too expensive at the same time that these continuing resolutions for the war, where we don’t even know what the cost is, are going through unabated. This is insanity.

“Everybody agrees this is the right thing to do except the Bush administration.”

Health coverage for poor children is provided by Medicaid. CHIP was originally designed to cover the children of the working poor. That has worked well, but there are still huge numbers of families who need help.

“The reality,” said Governor Spitzer, “is that there is an enormous proportion of American society above the poverty level but in the lower middle class that simply can’t afford health coverage.”

Wherever there are large numbers of families without coverage, you will find children who are suffering needlessly and, in extreme cases, dying. They don’t get the preventive care or the attention to chronic illness that they should.

“That has not only an immediate effect on their development,” said Mr. Spitzer, “but a long-term cost to society that is incalculable.”

Several states, including New York and New Jersey, have used federal waivers to raise the family income ceiling for eligibility to participate in CHIP. New Jersey, for example, offers coverage to the children of families with incomes as high as 350 percent of the official poverty rate for a family of four, which is $20,650 a year. New York has an upper limit of 250 percent of the poverty rate and is trying to raise it to 400 percent.

State officials said the onerous new rules would make it all but impossible to offer coverage beyond 250 percent of the poverty level.

Administration officials have argued that the CHIP program should adhere closely to its original intent of limiting coverage to families only slightly above the official poverty line. They said there is a danger that families with higher incomes would begin substituting CHIP for private insurance coverage.

The reality is that under the administration’s approach enormous numbers of children in families without a lot of money will be left with no coverage at all, private or otherwise. The expansion of CHIP is the most efficient, cost-effective way of reaching those youngsters.

Denying CHIP to such families forces them to seek out hospital emergency rooms when medical treatment can no longer be postponed. “I see it every day,” said Governor Corzine. “If you’re uninsured, particularly with children, if you don’t have a place to go, that’s where people show up.”

What’s happening is cruel. Children who should be eligible for CHIP are being held hostage to policies driven by a desire to protect the big insurance companies and an ideology that views CHIP, correctly, as yet another important step on the road to universal health care.

Ronald Reagan, one of the tribunes in the fight against Medicare and Medicaid back in the ’60s, pumped up the warnings against “socialized medicine” by saying that if Medicare becomes a reality “you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”

I wonder what crazy things the ideologues think would happen if CHIP is expanded to cover the children who have no health insurance today.

THE issue that separates the truly compassionate from the liars

2007-08-30T13:32:00.000-04:00

Ask them, ask the politicians and your neighbors, and anyone you meet... about "nanny state socialism" that would allow us ALL to live with health care.
Health care is a basic human right. If we need to write it into the Bill of Rights, then let's do it.
Any politician or voter who paints themself as "compassionate" needs to be on the correct side of this issue.
It is a litmus test.

Meanwhile, census figures reveal that this year two and two tenths million (2.2 million) more Americans entered the rank of uninsured just in one year, up to an unprecedented 47 million uninsured.
You call this first in the world?

I say we self-described compassionate ones have not followed the Golden Rule or the Sermon on the Mount, or loved our own brothers as we love ourselves.
This is third world behavior, folks. Dog eating dog.
The triumph of capitalism, indeed.
You ought to be ashamed, America.

Get this folks, one million of these newly uninsured are full time workers.
Where's their American Dream, America?

And this should kill ya, if you have a conscience, folks. The number of newly uninsured children rose by 600,000.
Why is any child in America being left behind?
How can we say "equal opportunity for all" when some are being hobbled from birth?
Children, America.
Eleven percent of the children in America are not covered by health insurance.
You ought to be ashamed.

Are we in a race to the bottom?
How can you still support these lying clowns in our political leadership?
Or should I characterize them as wolves, human wolves.

But hope dies last: Kucinich and Edwards are both talking seriously of what Senator Cornyn called "the mythical little guy." We ain't mythical, and we would be the big guy if we got together on this one. Fairness, it should begin at conception.

The Lord of War Speaks and Fog comes out - Catapulting a ball of confusion

2007-08-24T07:57:00.000-04:00

Dubya is delusional, but at least he is warming to the idea of a Vietnam-Iraq analogy, after all these years of dismissing the concept.

He is one of the power group who conveniently find it unprofitable to learn from mistakes (or history), although America knew that he was a failed business executive (multiple failures) and they hired him anyway. (I know, I know, Gore did win, but the numbers were so close that they could be finagled.)
Does anybody have Dubya on tape during his first election campaign repeating that America should not be into nation building! I remember I saw him say it in a debate with Gore.

If wishes were ponies, Laura would slip a copy of Fog of War into his dvd mix, but I doubt he would understand it.
Fog of War... Let's see, if it took our politicians years to finally admit the error of invading Vietnam, even after they knew it was a mistake to go on for one more minute, and about half, or 26 or 27 thousand extra American soldiers (and untold "collateral" Vietnamese "damage") lives were wasted in the name of political face, then we are looking for Dubya and his henchman Dirty Dick to sacrifice a whole lot more American soldiers and "collateral" Iraqi "damage".

Which is probably why the 14 spankin' new permanent bases are built in Iraq but the hospitals, roads, schools, power grid and civil law and order infrastructure are all still a shocked and awed shambles.

But the potential for profit is still on the upside!
Isn't that what Capitalism is all about?
Blood for oil, arms sales, bloated privatized military contracts... Didn't one of those neo-con snake oil salesmen once say on the edge of chaos is where the potential for profit lays?
Iraq is not the only sheep being shorn here folks.

If you were slightly stirred by the scarey images of horror that Dubya catapulted at the Vet convention, I would like you to remember, we bombed Cambodia for politics, to impress the folks at home, that is why all those things Dubya catapulted on about happened under the Pol Pot regime.

I even am hearing the repetitious right wing meme that we can install a strong man in Iraq and pull out (to the permanent bases.) If horrors are to happen, wouldn't a strong man do them, worse than a civil war.
I say, let the Iraqis lead themselves for a change. We might all be surprised.

And what, aside from the astonishing fog-blowing act Dubya performed for the Vets, makes you think that the Iraqis will follow us home to make war on us here? Like the Vietnamese followed us home to make war on us? The American public must have ADD and memory loss if they believe Dubya's bull shit.
I listened to the words he was saying and kept thinking "WHAT is he TALKIN' about! WHAT KIND of LOGIC is he making? Do other Americans, like those Vets at that convention, REALLY drink this man's KOOLAIDE without a single question, without the smallest twinge of cognitive dissonance?

Those guys at the convention should have known history better than that and booed him off the stage. What is America coming to, when political patriotism supplants memory, judgement, and honesty?

I've always said it - terrorism is a criminal act. Treat it like a crime and it'll get solved. Get military involved, and you'll lose more than your shirt to the war machine. You'll lose a lot of your soldiers.
We need to end war.
We need to begin diplomacy.
We need to regain our sanity.

Dear Democrats, issue "framers", and pundits:

2007-08-20T10:38:00.000-04:00

This frame is pure gold.

When the subject of universal health care is raised, hopefully, during 2008, PLEASE recall the Fed's action this last week.

Why is NANNY STATE SOCIALISM good for the financiers, the hedge fund managers and the stock market, but bad for the average "mythical little guy"?

this economy sucks for 80 percent of the people

2007-08-17T10:29:00.000-04:00

The Fed did what?

Reaganomics is a pirate's scheme to fleece the taxpayer.
Supply side economics supplies the rich guys and kills the poor.
You don't wanta know what it is that's trickling down. It only floats yachts. For the rest of us it's "neck deep in the big muddy and the big fool says push on".

It takes a whole lotta poor strapped homeowners going bankrupt to feed a hedge fund manager.
How long ago did the government quit reporting the M3 money supply?
I say watch out for price inflation on food, fuel, Chinese geegaws, the stuff you need to live. It's already starting.

an old woman calls CSPAN and says WE Gotta do What we GOTTA DO

2007-08-16T08:00:00.000-04:00

So afraid of "terror" she is, that she has murdered her own conscience.

Post under "cost of war":

Move decimal place 4 positions to left to see how many families could be fed for a year.
Move decimal place 5 positions to left to see how many homes could be converted to run forever on solar power.
Move decimal place 6 positions to left to see how many people could have basic health coverage without deductibles or co-pays for a lifetime.
For roughly twice the number above, the United States could replace its entire liquid fuel needs from wind power, and could do it in less time than has elapsed since it invaded Iraq.

Eventual Cost
Scott Wallsten, senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, AEI-Brookings and American Enterprise Institute, former economist at The World Bank, and staff economist at the U.S. President's Council of Economic Advisers, argues for a figure of $1 trillion in today’s dollars. Linda Bilmes, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former Clinton administration adviser, put a total price tag of more than $2 trillion.

I understand the Bush Dynasty's War on Iraq has cost more than a million Iraqi lives.
For what?

I understand super sensitive superpatriot Americans are still referring daily to September 11.

"Parallels" a.k.a. Vietraq
Big Brother makes Universal Soldiers of our sons to stoke the corporate war machine.

But (irony alert) I guess these young men are "fighting over there so that they don't have to fight someone over here". As in... WHO would they be fighting?

And they are "fighting for my freedom to say what I think." (Just be careful what you say, and who you say it to, and how you say it, even in what used to be called the privacy of your own home. Because if you wear a Casio watch, that could be proof enough for the Gonzales Star Chamber to declare you a terrorist, and you could be disappeared.)

That old woman with the pragmatic view of the valuelessness of the Bill of Rights just put ZERO value on the lives of the boys fighting over there.
Unless she meant we have to have them there so she can fill her tank on her Wallymart paycheck and still have something left to pay for food.
We're No. 1!

In the movie we say "This isn't Us."
Isn't it?

amen

2007-08-11T20:03:00.001-04:00

Representative Barbara Lee - Wisdom on record

2007-08-09T09:43:00.000-04:00

3 days after September 11, 2001.
The only voice of sanity in an insane world.
Telling Truth in the face of manufactured fear.
Refusing to be sold a bill of goods or manipulated.
The "bad guys" ALL know that the action is in the reaction.
Barara Lee was a rock.

When you want advice do you ask the guy who was WRONG last time?

2007-08-08T11:20:00.001-04:00

So wrong he should be ashamed:

And WHO was Correct? Mike Moore

my summer vacation

2007-08-08T11:17:00.000-04:00

2007-08-06T13:54:00.001-04:00

Dear Diane Rehm

2007-08-06T11:53:00.001-04:00

When book flogger Novak said Valerie Plame was NOT covert, all you needed were 2 words:
Brewster Jennings.

Thanks for nothin' Diane.

Nuke 'em Day

2007-08-06T08:53:00.000-04:00

Today the Japanese remember insanity.
They were victims of our nukes.
The only country to experience, first hand, the truth about nukes.
We nuked 'em.
The only country to ever use nukes on other human beings.
The biggest owner of nukes, the proliferator of nukes, the country who recently allowed it's Imperial Leader to negate the nuke treaty.
We need more and newer nukes, our old nukes are too... well, old. (What is the shelf life, er, half life of a nuke? only Dubya knows.)

How can any human being even consider this to be an option? When I hear a man say "nuke 'em" (and now candidate Hiroshima Hillary is spouting that filth) I think that man is not a human being, he is a koolaide drinking death-cultist, a cannibal with an ideology.

This is the day the Japanese recall insanity.

thru the lookinglass with Greg Palast

2007-08-06T08:50:00.000-04:00

from Go Left tv

2007-08-05T12:29:00.001-04:00

Dear Bill Moyers, on "Buying the War"

2007-08-03T22:56:00.000-04:00

...as opposed to "selling" the war.

You seem to "think" our main stream media was gullible. That seems to be the point of your program tonight on PBS.

I think many in the MSM were complicit.

(Probably paid off in one way or the other.
Elite, Privileged Americans, especially in D.C., are such brazen whores.)

President Bush freely has spoken of his role as a "propaganda catapult" so I don't think I'm spilling any beans here, neither am I a Conspiracy Theorist, as the folks on National Propaganda Radio used to say repeatedly, as if by mantra.

As a flyover midwestern housefrau who reads, I was aware of the avowed goals of the PNAC Neocons, the boldfaced lies of Colin Powell, Condoleeeza, Rumsey, Dick Cheney, and Dubya, Judith Miller's lying and the discrepancy between the front page and the interior pages of the New York Times, the influence of media ownership on reporting and editorial content, the idiocy of the pundits, the truth of Scott Ritter's, and Hans Blix' and Ray McGovern's professional testimony, and the odd juxtaposition of your pal, Dan Rather's complicity in the Bush National Guard records papers fiasco with his part in the Niger yellowcake paper's scandal.

Do you remember how "boldly" Dan Rather revealed those phony papers - obviously fraudulent - and then the War Party administration... as if scripted for a serial weekly television show ... was able to say the LIBRUL MEDIA was phonying up papers to smear the noble Bush, and thus they got a free ride on the truly phony Niger papers?

This is from Media Matters, to jog your memory...

"Power Line's Johnson falsely claimed CBS panel found Bush Air National Guard documents were forged"
On the November 13 edition of CNN's Reliable Sources, Scott Johnson, a fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute and a contributor to the right-wing weblog Power Line, falsely claimed that the independent panel hired by CBS to investigate the reporting of a September 8, 2004, 60 Minutes Wednesday segment questioning President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service found that documents cited in the 60 Minutes Wednesday story were forgeries. But contrary to Johnson's assertion, the independent panel's report reached no conclusion as to whether the documents were forged.

Johnson appeared on Reliable Sources opposite Eric Boehlert, a former senior writer at the online magazine Salon and a contributor to The Huffington Post website. During the segment, Boehlert asked rhetorically, "[I]f the documents [upon which the 60 Minutes Wednesday segment was based] were forgery [sic], why didn't Republican Richard Thornburgh [co-chairman of the panel investigating the 60 Minutes Wednesday segment] make that conclusion in his report? He couldn't. And he wouldn't." Johnson responded, "It's on Page 175 [of the report]."

In fact, Page 175 of the independent panel report contains no conclusions about the authenticity of the documents. Page 175 contains the panel's assessment of testimony provided by typography expert Peter Tytell (whose testimony Johnson cited during the Reliable Sources segment). The report states that the panel "found [Tytell's] analysis sound in terms of why he believed the documents were not authentic," but adds, "[t]he [p]anel reaches no conclusion as to whether Tytell was correct in all respects." Moreover, in its executive summary, the report states that although the panel "identified a number of issues that raise serious questions about the authenticity of the documents and their content," it "has not been able to conclude with absolute certainty whether the ... documents are authentic or forgeries."

In the executive summary, the report states that the September 8, 2004, 60 Minutes Wednesday story on Bush's Texas Air National Guard service "failed to meet" CBS' standards of "accuracy and fairness." The panel found that "with better reporting ... questions [about the authenticity of the documents] should have been raised before the September 8 [s]egment aired." The panel's report, made public on January 10, prompted the ouster of four CBS News employees, including Mary Mapes, the producer of the faulted segment, who also appeared on the November 13 edition of Reliable Sources. CBS News' Dan Rather, who reported the 60 Minutes Wednesday segment on Bush's Texas Air National Guard service, also announced his retirement as anchor of CBS' Evening News November 23, 2004, following the flap over the story. Rather claimed he made the decision to resign during the summer of 2004, and he continued to host the Evening News until March 9, 2005.

From the November 23 edition of CNN's Reliable Sources:

JOHNSON: Well, I just go back to the fact that the substance of the story was a hoax without those documents, which were absolutely forgeries. Look at -- look at the Thornburgh report has the testimony of Peter Tytell, who indicates that this Times New Roman type that those four documents were prepared in didn't exist on typewriters. And he concludes that those were word-processed documents.

HOWARD KURTZ (host): Right.

JOHNSON: Without the documents, there was no story.

KURTZ: In fairness, there were different experts, although many experts do agree with the expert hired by the commission. But you just used the word "hoax." That's a very strong word, because that suggests that CBS and Mary Mapes and Dan Rather did this deliberately, as opposed to perhaps not being careful enough. Do you believe they actually tried to mislead viewers?

JOHNSON: Well, all I would say is the evidence in the report of coordination with the Kerry campaign is substantial. But I will say, now, for Mary Mapes to come on this show this morning and reiterate these fraudulent charges, is a hoax, is a deliberate fraud. Whatever was the status of the story on September 8, 2004, in November 2005, it is a knowing fraud.

KURTZ: Eric Boehlert, you've got the last 20 seconds.

BOEHLERT: Well, that's the problem with this. You know, I think the bloggers got -- hit a home run with this, and their arrogance is now out of control. They're saying the whole Bush National Guard story is a joke. And if the documents were forgery [sic], why didn't Republican Richard Thornburgh make that conclusion in his report? He couldn't. And he wouldn't.

KURTZ: All right.

JOHNSON: It's on Page 175.

Now Bill, Juxtapose that report with this, from Jefferson Morley, in the WaPost:

The Niger Papers: Obstacles to Coverage
Could a media scandal from the 2004 election wind up hindering a major U.S. media organization from following up on the Bush administration's alleged use of forged documents to justify the Iraq war?
The Los Angeles Times is one of several U.S. papers to pick up on the La Repubblica series, focusing on the travails of Elizabeth Burba, the writer for the Italian weekly Panorama who was one of the first journalists to receive the bogus papers on Iraq's alleged attempts to acquire nuclear materials in Africa.Burba told the LAT "she wanted to press ahead with efforts to investigate the case further and determine who forged the documents, but her magazine never published any additional reports."
Panorama is owned by the family of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. The Italian leader was a strong supporter of the U.S. effort to topple Saddam Hussein.
Burba "has also been interviewed by the CBS investigative show '60 Minutes' for a piece on the documents that was pulled in the wake of the problems that brought down Dan Rather," according to the LAT.
But after suffering a major black eye last year for relying on forged documents for a story about President Bush's National Guard service, CBS would risk controversy if it aired a story about how the Bush administration allegedly relied on doctored intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. CBS's coverage would seem to be handcuffed, at least temporarily, by Rather's 2004 election mistake.

So Bill, Bill, Bill, I must ask you. Why did you feature Dan Rather so prominently now, in 2007, in this package, "Buying the War" that you are selling as a fundraiser for PBS? Are we fogging history in order to rewrite it? Are we packaging the truth for insertion in the Memory Hole?

Dan Rather was a schill who helped Dubya get re-elected and helped him lead us to war.

I, a nobody, knew Dan Rather personally shared a Western ranch property with his personal pal Don Rumsfield. Didn't it occur to you that when Dan Rather brought out the obviously phony documents that he was playing the crucial role that he was groomed for all these years? Why bring that dirty mole back out of the wormy woodwork?
I learned in the nursery that birds of a feather flock together.
Let Dan Rather rot on Rumsey's Ranch.
I mix metphors when I'm mad. Deal with it.

Post script... and now Charley Rose is interviewing the fabulist Robert Novak, telling twisted tales from his bent perspective.
Hope dies last. PBS has drunk the Koolaide.

Dear Mainstream Media

2007-08-03T09:28:00.000-04:00

I wake up a few days ago to hear on the radio that Condoleeeza is offering 44 Billion of my taxpayer dollar bills worth of arms to countries in the Mideast.
Then I hear the figure 20 Billion, Today it is 60 Billion. What the hell are you doing with this reporting? What figure can I quote when I'm painting my signs and writing my letters? What the hell figure can I quote when I'm expressing my rage?
I'm having some "cognitive dissonance" here, folks. Help me out.

Seize the Day is a British group, but the sentiment is the same.

We have 60 Billion taxpayer dollars to supply more carnage, but we don't have money to insure our children, or fix our bridges, or pay our fruit pickers a living wage...
in this great moral self proclaimed Christian nation.

Impeach Gonzo

2007-08-01T07:09:00.000-04:00

Details here.

2007-07-30T08:23:00.001-04:00

there is another way

2007-07-30T08:14:00.000-04:00

they want you to think there are only two choices...

peaceful gardeners tasered

2007-07-26T12:08:00.000-04:00

what is this land coming to?
search google videos: taser garden protest Vermont

Visit Youtube for the story.

Or, Maybe, just maybe, it is the old song being played again (link). We are regressing, and history will rinse, repeat. Watch the movie, do the cops hitting the sit-downers look familiar?

prophecy doesn't belong exclusively to pandering television christian fundamentalists

2007-07-26T10:56:00.000-04:00

the future - it's murder
Leonard Cohen, prophet

everybody knows he's way too cool

democracy is coming to the U.S.A. I hope it gets here sooner rather than later...

a pause for some kulture

2007-07-24T09:09:00.001-04:00

Gingsberg on amerika - ballad of skeletons

bomb

his letter to america, 1956

and a living artist, Coby Batty

the downward spiral of repetitive history. 1969

2007-07-24T08:44:00.000-04:00

Chomsky eats lunch.

Dear Patrick Fitzgerald

2007-07-13T08:54:00.000-04:00

You have been the biggest disappointment in this disappointing century.
A crime was committed.
Treason.
Your instruction was to investigate.
Yes, they kicked some sand in the umpire's eyes ... so you just quit?
This is not sandlot baseball.
You are a professional. DO YOUR JOB.

Is this all we deserve, after two hundred years of democracy?
What a way for a nation to die, starved for the truth, starved for justice, lied to, robbed.
(note: The video is posted properly, but there must be some screw up on the host. Anyway - it's worth watching... go to Youtube and search for Ambassador Wilson's testimony. he said a lot of the same things I've been saying but with more athori-tah.)

remember when oil was 20 dollars a barrrel?

2007-07-09T20:51:00.000-04:00

And Bush's war only cost We the People (the American taxpayers) a billion a week?
Good thing we have soma (24-7 television coverage of a rock concert for dead Diana, and Paris-and-Brittany's latest doin's) to paralyze our brain cells... otherwise... We'd be ticked.

Report: Wars Cost US $12 Billion a Month
By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The boost in troop levels in Iraq has increased the cost of war there and in Afghanistan to $12 billion a month, and the total for Iraq alone is nearing a half-trillion dollars, congressional analysts say.

All told, Congress has appropriated $610 billion in war-related money since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror assaults, roughly the same as the war in Vietnam. Iraq alone has cost $450 billion.

The figures come from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, which provides research and analysis to lawmakers.

For the 2007 budget year, CRS says, the $166 billion appropriated to the Pentagon represents a 40 percent increase over 2006.

The Vietnam War, after accounting for inflation, cost taxpayers $650 billion, according to separate CRS estimates.

The $12 billion a month "burn rate" includes $10 billion for Iraq and almost $2 billion for Afghanistan, plus other minor costs. That's higher than Pentagon estimates earlier this year of $10 billion a month for both operations. Two years ago, the average monthly cost was about $8 billion.

Among the reasons for the higher costs is the cost of repairing and replacing equipment worn out in harsh conditions or destroyed in combat.

But the estimates call into question the Pentagon's estimate that the increase in troop strength and intensifying pace of operations in Baghdad and Anbar province would cost only $5.6 billion through the end of September.

If Congress approves President Bush's pending request for another $147 billion for the budget year starting Oct. 1, the total bill for the war on terror since Sept. 11 would reach more than three-fourths of a trillion dollars, with appropriations for Iraq reaching $567 billion.

Also, if the increase in war tempo continues beyond September, the Pentagon's request "would presumably be inadequate," CRS said.

The latest estimates come as support for the war in Iraq among Bush's GOP allies in Congress is beginning to erode. Senior Republicans such as Pete Domenici of New Mexico and Richard Lugar of Indiana have called for a shift in strategy in Iraq and a battle over funding the war will resume in September, when Democrats in Congress begin work on a funding bill for the war.

Congress approved $99 billion in war funding in May after a protracted battle and a Bush veto of an earlier measure over Democrats' attempt to set a timeline for withdrawing U.S. combat troops from Iraq.

The report faults the Pentagon for using the Iraq war as a pretext for boosting the Pentagon's non-war budget by costs such as procurement, increasing the size of the military and procurement of replacement aircraft as war-related items.

The new estimate comes as the White House and Democrats are fighting over spending bills for next year. That battle is over about $22 billion _ almost the cost of two months' fighting in Iraq.

"Think about what $10 billion a month would mean to protecting Americans from terrorism, improving security at our ports and airports, and increasing border security," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press.

why I love Michael Moore

2007-07-09T20:44:00.000-04:00

a hometown boy does good, damn good

How many people can you name in the mainstream media who have been as correct, right, prescient, and humane as Michael Moore?

bang the pots and pans

2007-07-09T20:33:00.000-04:00

ECFS Received your Submission/Request at Mon Jul 9 14:54:42 EDT 2007
Eastern Time.

Your filing will be available for viewing online one (1) business day after the receipt of this confirmation. Filers are encouraged to retrieve and view their filing by going to http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/ecfs and clicking on the "Search for Filed Comments" link.
My Comment:

the final frontier for full information supression
Net Neutrality is essential to free speech, equal opportunity and economic innovation in America. Since the FCC removed this basic protection in 2005, the top executives of phone and cable companies have stated their intention to become the Internet's gatekeepers and to discriminate against Web sites that don't pay their added tolls.

This fundamental change would end the open Internet as we know it. It would damage my ability to connect with others, share information and participate in our 21st century democracy and economy. The FCC must ensure that broadband providers do not block, interfere with or discriminate against any lawful Internet traffic based on its ownership, source or destination.

Now it's your turn...

Why I love Buzzflash.com

2007-07-09T20:25:00.000-04:00

...editorials like these, that make me think!

Nobody Marched To Impeach Bill Clinton!
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Linda Milazzo
NOBODY marched to impeach Bill Clinton. Angry citizens DIDN'T fill the streets, carry signs, and beg a non-responsive Congress to do its Constitutional duty and remove Bill Clinton from his job. Panels WEREN'T held across the nation, moderated by Constitutional scholars who loved their country so much that they traversed its full span to inform packed audiences of the high crimes Bill Clinton had done.

Nope. That DIDN'T happen.

In 1998, thousands upon thousands of Americans DIDN'T call, write, fax, and visit their elected leaders every day imploring them to impeach Bill Clinton. Millions of citizens DIDN'T believe the rest of the world wanted Bill Clinton impeached. Groups of citizen activists DIDN'T band together to camp out at their Representatives' homes and district offices for days, sometimes weeks, holding "Impeach Bill Clinton" signs and wearing "Impeach Bill Clinton" T-shirts. Thousands of cars DIDN'T bear "Impeach Bill Clinton" bumper stickers.

Nope. That DIDN'T happen.

Average citizens DIDN'T travel to Washington, DC to walk the halls of Congress and seek audiences with their elected officials demanding to have Bill Clinton impeached.

Nuh-uh!

"Impeachment Centers" WEREN'T opened dedicated to impeaching Bill Clinton like the one in Los Angeles that opened on the Fourth of July, dedicated to impeaching George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Hundreds of people DIDN'T join together in a park on a national holiday for an impeach-Bill-Clinton-rally the way they joined together in a park in Los Angeles on Wednesday for an impeach-Bush-and-Cheney-rally.

In 1998, the people DIDN'T need to inspire Congress to impeach Bill Clinton. The 105th Congress couldn't wait to throw the popular President out of his job. In fact they impeached Bill Clinton even though we-the-people implored them not to.
Of course, there were some Americans in 1998 who bought the smear and destroy campaign by the rabid Republican spin-machine and rabid Republican legislators to impeach Bill Clinton under the guise of restoring the Presidency. These duped citizens were conned by mainstream media's daily theatrics, directed by then-adulterer Congressman Henry Hyde, then-adulterer Speaker Newt Gingrich, then drug-addict Rush Limbaugh, future-indicted Congressman Tom Delay, and Special Pornographer Kenneth Starr. (My apologies to Larry Flynt).

How ironic for Gingrich and Hyde that Clinton was caught with his pants down just as they were dropping theirs. How further ironic that the lynchpin asserting the case for Clinton's impeachment was Ken Starr's obsessively compiled pornographic tome, whereas Americans today have a virtual library of scholarly books on the Constitutional merits of impeaching Bush and Cheney. Thanks to Mr. Starr's salacious expose, it is likely his lurid accounting of a private consensual affair will be his singular most powerful climax.

The fact is, during the 105th Congress's impeachment of Bill Clinton, Clinton's public APPROVAL rating was a positive 73%. Conversely, as the current 110th Congress takes NO action to impeach George W. Bush, Bush's public APPROVAL ratings range between 28% and 36%.

This means the people's well-liked President Clinton was penalized, while the people's despised President Bush is allowed to stay on. If this isn't a failure of democracy of, for, and by the people, then what is?

link for rest of article

A chorus of hypocrites, that's what the right is.

On ANOTHER DAY Buzz flashed this one...
Smartest thing I read all day.

Subject: How Do You Do It BuzzFlashers?

How do you all keep up the faith? In early May I returned from a trip to Vegas with a girlfriend. My husband asked if I had heard the news that week. No, says I because we never turned on a TV or read a newspaper. He then informed me of the vote wherein congress gave Bush a blank check. I went immediately to my computer and deleted ALL my political sites, have hardly watched the news, changed from our best newspaper to the fluff one and turned a deaf ear to anything political. The news of Scooter Libby tempeted me to return to Buzz. I will vote in 2008 because I have always done so and because women fought and won a difficult battle to get the vote. What I will not do is vote for a Republican or a Democrat. Members of congress will do or say anything to get elected or re-elected. I still believe in our democtatic principles but can not find the words to express the contempt I feel for congress!
Sandra Boynton
Rathdrum, Idaho

To All:
This was sent to President Bush yesterday.

King George the First: 3 July 2007

Delighted to know you commuted the jail portion of Lewis "Scooter" Libby's sentence for perjury. He does not deserve jail for covering your and Cheney's part in a felony, the leak of classified CIA information. Now, American people know Libby was the fall guy for both of you.

Along with this, they also know, as long as you are President, the Executive Branch of government will not be held accountable for any crimes. After all you have executed near 1000 Presidential Signing Statements into law which only pertain to "We The People"' and not you or your Executive Branch. This truly earns you the title of King George the First, of the USA since our representative form of government with true justice for all is null and void.
Disgusted,
Colonel Colin J. N. Chauret,
USAF Retired Fighter Pilot 31 Years Active Service, 1942-1973
Universal City, TX

Subject: Impeachment
Of commutation, executive privilege & impeachment

The commutation of I. Lewis "Scooter Libby was the last straw!
The Bush Administration has constantly ignored the rule of law and the constitution. While the commutation is within the guidelines of the law it is a direct affront to the citizens of the the jury comprised of "Scooter's" peers, the legal system and the citizens of the United States. Following a lengthy trail, the jury and the judge found the sentence to be impartial and fair. President Bush -- please excuse "President" and "Bush" in the same phrase -- have never recognized a cognizant or a fair and impartial decision. Because of that philosophy, Bush still decided to commute the 2-1/2 year sentence. To minimize the impact of the commuted sentence he agreed to impose the $250,000 fine and two-year probation ... what he thinks is a politically viable solution. IT'S NOT!
It is time for American citizens to say enough is enough. Commutation, executive privilege and impeachment are no longer "off the table." It is time to take "corrective action!" And it is time to begin articles of impeachment for the "ring leader" -- George W Bush -- as well as Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales and "Condosleezza" Rice.
This has to happen in order for the USA to regain its reputation -- not only with its citizens, but with the world community.
It is time to act now! IMPEACH ' EM ALL!
AL Ainsworth
Portland, Oregon

Subject: David Brooks: A kinder, gentler bastard
BuzzFlash,
I have long wondered whether the pundit David Brooks was just stupid or an extremely clever master of deception. He projects a kind image by two means; a soft and gentle apologetic persona, and admitting mistakes were made by the extreme right. However, the mistakes are always admitted long after it can do any good. For example, he was a big supporter of the war with Iraq when it mattered. When public opinion needed to be swayed. Now, years later, he admits, that there is a slight possibility it might have been a mistake. That shows, of course, how reasonable he is.
He is oh so gentle, in supporting things like torture, with his gestures and quiet voice, struggling to find a "middle ground." The article he wrote on the Bush pardon of Libby leaves no doubt that he is just a gentler, kinder gentler bastard not at all naive.
Here the facts are well known, at the time of the event. All the evil of the outing of Valerie Plame appears in numerous reports and the sworn testimony during the Libby trial. For him to toe the party line has to be an extremely deliberate and evil act. I am sure a few years from now his rhetoric will soften, when it doesn't matter anymore. But there will be no new facts. He will just use the change in tone to show again how reasonable he is.
A Memo for David Brooks (davidcorn.com)

The soft-on-torture liberal
Subject: The Pledge, The Turn, The Prestige
If you saw the movie “The Prestige,” you have an inkling of the magic act George W. Bush just performed by commuting I. “Scooter” Libby’s legally derived, appealed and reaffirmed jail sentence imposed by a court of law and a jury of his peers.
According to the movie, a magic act consists of three parts. The “Pledge” is the part of a magic act where the magician shows the audience a common object or person and then promises they will see something special happen on stage. In the case of the United States vs. “Scooter” Libby, Mr. Cheney, Bush's stagehand, took Mr. Libby and either convinced him to lie to a Federal Grand Jury or, at the very least, turned the other way while Rove and Libby conspired to block a special investigation of the Valerie Plame national security leak.

The “Turn” is the part where the magician distracts his audience and then proceeds to involve his subject in an amazing feat of magic. In the case of Mr. Libby, the audience was fed a continual stream of disinformation about prosecutor Fitzgerald, Valerie Plame, and Joe Wilson while the affable looking Libby wove a fabric of lies to protect himself and his superiors from spending time in jail. Magically, he claimed his hitherto well-documented keen memory failed him while testifying. He was just confused, his attorneys said. Given his years of service in which he used that very same memory to execute the complexities of his job at the highest levels of government, the loss of memory has become a legendary piece of Houdini history.

The “Prestige” is the final part of the trick, where the magician asks his audience to suspend their disbelief and accept that the magic and reality are one in the same. The willing subject mysteriously escapes one box and appears in another. The audience claps and scratches their heads’ as they leave the theater wondering how it was done.

In three carefully crafted acts our magician, our President, executed his well planned trick. First, he allowed his Vice President and staff to conspire to leak highly classified information. Second, he denied he or any member of his staff participated in the Plame affair and assured us if they did they would be punished according to the law. Third, our President waved his magic pen, ignored the law he told us he would abide by and commuted the jail sentence of his willing subject, I. “Scooter” Libby, who slipped quietly out the back door.

In the end, the “Prestige” had been executed perfectly. But as in any magic act, the reality is always hiding behind the curtain. Everyone knows it. Everyone has come to expect it. Everyone accepts it.

And so we are left wondering, when will George W. Bush and his stage hands be back in town for another performance? Will it be today, tomorrow or perhaps during the next Presidential election? Will the tricks and the tricksters ever leave the stage? Only the magician has the answer and it is unlikely he will ever reveal the secret. Poof!
George Gerber
Doylestown, PA

Why are we in Iraq when Flint Michigan looks like a bomb dropped?

2007-07-05T10:43:00.000-04:00

There is an alternative.

"Let's get out of Iraq and rebuild America first."
--Merle Haggard

Keith hits another one out of the park

2007-07-04T16:12:00.000-04:00

the office pool...

2007-06-28T07:42:00.000-04:00

... says the "missing family jewel" is the Kennedy assasination.

...or just maybe little Georgie W. was a Manchurian Candidate.

oh that Cheney, he's such a scamp

2007-06-28T07:38:00.000-04:00

Remember back when all vice president Gore did to raise the ire of the national media was to use the office phone to raise funds from some buddhist nuns?

the smartest guy I've heard all day...

2007-06-22T12:50:00.000-04:00

and I listened to NPR this morning. Kat Williams calls our gov't. a bunch of pimps.

a little alarm clock music

2007-06-07T07:06:00.001-04:00

Rage against the machine singing a little American history.
Wake up.

Antiflag reminds you why you gotta go to work to pay them bills.
One trillion dollars.

Dedicated to the NeoCons, the Neolibs, and the MIC.
I actually heard the meme change from a mouthpiece on NPR- we are now fighting in Iraq to protect our way of life.

So ... we're being bled dry so we can have our stuff.

There is an alternative, you know.

Wake up. Get up and go to work, people, but work for something else.
There is an alternative.

Impeach.

2007-06-05T06:38:00.000-04:00

WHY CHENEY? To protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America from all enemies whether foreign or domestic. Cindy quit, and said 'it's up to us.'
The Iraq War is a symptom. The Constituion is the cure. But the people we elected to defend the Constitution are busy playing politics, another name for the shell game.
They fiddle while Rome burns.

Cheney and Dubya know about Rome falling. They figure some rich patrician Imperial Roman folk got out with their riches intact, and became kings.
We are heading toward feudalism in every way I can think of, only worse.
Wake up, we the people.
The dark ages are coming if we don't change course.

June 3, 2007
NYT Editorial
Dick Cheney Rules
Americans are accustomed to Vice President Dick Cheney’s waiting out a terrorist threat in a “secure undisclosed location.” Now it seems that Mr. Cheney wears the cloak of invisibility in secure disclosed locations.

The Associated Press reported that Mr. Cheney’s office ordered the Secret Service last September to destroy all records of visitors to the official vice presidential mansion — right after The Washington Post sued for access to the logs. That move was made in secret, naturally. It came out only because of another lawsuit, filed by a private group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, seeking the names of conservative religious figures who visited the vice president’s residence.

This disdain for accountability is distressing, but not surprising. Mr. Cheney has had it on display from his first days in office, when he refused to name the energy-industry executives who met with him behind closed doors to draft an energy policy.

In a similar way, Mr. Cheney seems unconcerned about little things like checks and balances and traditional American notions of judicial process. At one point, he gave himself the power to selectively declassify documents and selectively leak them to reporters. In a recent commencement address, he declaimed against prisoners who had the gall to “demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States.”

Mr. Cheney is the driving force behind the Bush administration’s theory of the “unitary executive,” which holds that no one, including Congress and the courts, has the power to supervise or regulate the actions of the president. Just as he pays little attention to old-fangled notions of the separation of powers, Mr. Cheney does not overly bother himself about the bright line that should exist between his last job as chief of the energy giant Halliburton and his current one on the public payroll.

From 2001 to 2005, Mr. Cheney received “deferred salary payments” from Halliburton that far exceeded what taxpayers gave him. Mr. Cheney still holds hundreds of thousands of stock options that have ballooned by millions of dollars as Halliburton profited handsomely from the war in Iraq.

Reviewing this record — secrecy, impatience with government regulations, backroom dealings, handsome paydays — it dawned on us that Mr. Cheney is in step with the times. He has privatized the job of vice president of the United States.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

============================================
And the criminality was intentional - that makes it treason.

Fitzgerald Again Points to Cheney
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/05/29/BL2007052901024.html?hpid=topnews

Special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald has made it clearer than ever that he was hot on the trail of a coordinated campaign to out CIA agent Valerie Plame until that line of investigation was cut off by the repeated lies from Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Libby was convicted in February of perjury and obstruction of justice. Fitzgerald filed a memo on Friday asking U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, who will sentence Libby next week, to put him in prison for at least two and a half years.

Despite all the public interest in the case, Fitzgerald has repeatedly asserted that grand-jury secrecy rules prohibit him from being more forthcoming about either the course of his investigation or any findings beyond those he disclosed to make the case against Libby. But when his motives have been attacked during court proceedings, Fitzgerald has occasionally shown flashes of anger -- and has hinted that he and his investigative team suspected more malfeasance at higher levels of government than they were able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

In Friday's eminently readable court filing, Fitzgerald quotes the Libby defense calling his prosecution "unwarranted, unjust, and motivated by politics." In responding to that charge, the special counsel evidently felt obliged to put Libby's crime in context. And that context is Dick Cheney.
Libby's lies, Fitzgerald wrote, "made impossible an accurate evaluation of the role that Mr. Libby and those with whom he worked played in the disclosure of information regarding Ms. Wilson's CIA employment and about the motivations for their actions."

It was established at trial that it was Cheney himself who first told Libby about Plame's identity as a CIA agent, in the course of complaining about criticisms of the administration's run-up to war leveled by her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. And, as Fitzgerald notes: "The evidence at trial further established that when the investigation began, Mr. Libby kept the Vice President apprised of his shifting accounts of how he claimed to have learned about Ms. Wilson's CIA employment."

The investigation, Fitzgerald writes, "was necessary to determine whether there was concerted action by any combination of the officials known to have disclosed the information about Ms. Plame to the media as anonymous sources, and also whether any of those who were involved acted at the direction of others. This was particularly important in light of Mr. Libby's statement to the FBI that he may have discussed Ms. Wilson's employment with reporters at the specific direction of the Vice President."

Not clear on the concept yet? Fitzgerald adds: "To accept the argument that Mr. Libby's prosecution is the inappropriate product of an investigation that should have been closed at an early stage, one must accept the proposition that the investigation should have been closed after at least three high-ranking government officials were identified as having disclosed to reporters classified information about covert agent Valerie Wilson, where the account of one of them was directly contradicted by other witnesses, where there was reason to believe that some of the relevant activity may have been coordinated, and where there was an indication from Mr. Libby himself that his disclosures to the press may have been personally sanctioned by the Vice President."

Up until now, Fitzgerald's most singeing attack on Cheney came during closing arguments at the Libby trial in February. Libby's lawyers had complained that Fitzgerald was trying to put a "cloud" over Cheney without evidence to back it up -- and that set Fitzgerald off. As I wrote in my Feb. 21 column, the special counsel responded with fire: "There is a cloud over what the Vice President did that week. . . . He had those meetings. He sent Libby off to [meet then-New York Times reporter] Judith Miller at the St. Regis Hotel. At that meeting, the two-hour meeting, the defendant talked about the wife. We didn't put that cloud there. That cloud remains because the defendant has obstructed justice and lied about what happened. . . .

"That's not something that we put there. That cloud is something that we just can't pretend isn't there."

To those of us watching the investigation and trial unfold, Cheney's presence behind the scenes has emerged in glimpses and hints. (The defense's decision not to call Cheney to the stand remains a massive bummer.) But I suspect that people looking back on this story will see it with greater clarity: As a blatant -- and thus far successful -- cover-up for the vice president.

cindy wakes up

2007-05-30T07:58:00.001-04:00

the man who was damn RIGHT, ALL ALONG and who is still damn right

2007-05-30T06:59:00.000-04:00

Scott Ritter, video by the Traprock Peace Center

guaranteeing crooked elections by law

2007-05-27T19:30:00.000-04:00

2007-05-27T13:10:00.001-04:00

The Rats Betrayed Us

2007-05-27T12:21:00.000-04:00

I ask you, Why Would I Bother to spend an hour fighting traffic, and paying $3.50 a gallon for gas to get there, to spend a day in Detroit attending a townhall meeting on the impeachment of the biggest criminal in American history, when Representative JOHN CONYERS, who HOLDS the GAVEL, has said time and time again that he will not proceed on impeachment?
He sent his wife to the last townhall meeting on the War on Iraq in Flint, afraid to show his face to the same crowd of Progressives who brought him in to speak about giving him the gavel before the last election. We served his purpose, to get him reelected, and now he ignores us. SHAME.

The 14 NO votes

2007-05-27T12:14:00.000-04:00

The 14 N0 votes:
These are the only loyal opposition left.
The rest have essentially voted for Emperor Bush to do as he pleases, and he pleases to invade Iran and rob the American taxpayer's treasury.
DemocRATs, you will be blamed in years to come for your spinelessness.
Fill your pockets now, boys, then go home and stay there.
Senator Levin, where were you?
Is your loyalty to Israeli lobbyists trumping you oath to the American Constitution?

Boxer (D-CA)
Burr (R-NC)
Clinton (D-NY)
Coburn (R-OK)
Dodd (D-CT)
Enzi (R-WY)
Feingold (D-WI)
Kennedy (D-MA)
Kerry (D-MA)
Leahy (D-VT)
Obama (D-IL)
Sanders (I-VT)
Whitehouse (D-RI)
Wyden (D-OR)

Democrats fold

2007-05-23T18:39:00.000-04:00

Hope Springs Eternally

2007-05-23T08:52:00.000-04:00

Good quality sign, made it through almost a full year. None of the neighbors have complained yet. Yes, I know the birdbath needs a scubbing and yes, that is a dandelion. Nobody's perfect.At least I don't invade other countries.

the state of America

2007-05-19T11:14:00.001-04:00

alarm clock

2007-05-11T09:35:00.001-04:00

2007-05-10T08:17:00.001-04:00

But the contractors on the humvee job are Makin' OUT!
Milkin' the Cash Cow A.k.a. the American taxpayer ... for years on end.
(I happen to know this for a fact from the ground level, not from reading the news.)
Maybe we had other priorities for our tax dollars?
Naw...
Remember when the Humvees were top heavy and rolling over? Now...

Humvee Doors Trap Troops
United Press International
May 08, 2007
WASHINGTON - Doors that jam shut during an attack are an unintended consequence of the Pentagon's effort to add armor to Humvees transporting U.S. troops in Iraq.

Due to the jamming problem, records show the Army must fix the doors of some 18,000 armored Humvees that serve as the main troop transport vehicle, USA Today reports.

One quick fix to the problem is to weld hooks to the Humvee doors so another truck can rip them off with a cable and release the troops.

"Every Humvee outside (a fortified base) will have a hook," says Lt. Col. William Wiggins, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon.

The Army plans to spend $284 million this year on Humvee armor kits to protect U.S. troops from makeshift roadside bombs.

Improvised explosive devices are the No. 1 killer of U.S. troops in Iraq, causing 70 percent of injuries and death.

Woke up, late

2007-05-08T21:54:00.000-04:00

Been reading a lot of good stuff on Common Dreams, Alternet, TomDispatch, Antiwar lately... this one gets me.

One Day You’re Gonna Wake Up
by David Michael Green
Published on Friday, May 4, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

One day you’re gonna wake up, America.

And, like every other one since last you can remember, it’s gonna be an ugly morning.

One day you’re gonna wake up and go to your lousy job with its lousy salary and non-existent benefits. You might even remember the good job you once had. Or that the government you once supported gave tax breaks to companies like the one that exported that good job of yours to the Third World (which is what they’re now starting to call your country). Or that that same government undermined the labor unions which fought to get you your good wages and benefits.

One day you’re gonna wake up and be furious at the monstrous tax burden you are carrying, a tab which accounts for fifty of the seventy hours you must work each week just to eke by. You might even figure out why your tax bill is so high. You might remember that the government you once supported shifted the tax burden from the rich onto people like you, and from the taxpayers of the time onto those of today. And that they borrowed money in astonishing quantities to fund their sleight-of-hand, so that you work thirty hours a week just to pay the interest on a mountain of money borrowed decades ago.

One day you’re gonna wake up in anger at the absurdly poor education your children are receiving. You’re gonna remember that it wasn’t always that way, that even after the military’s voracious appetite was temporarily sated, your country still managed to find a few bucks to at least educate a workforce. No more. And you’re gonna remember how you applauded when your educational system was twisted in to a test taking industry that is careful, above all, not to teach children how to think.

One day you’re gonna wake up literally sick and tired. You’re gonna want treatment for your maladies but you won’t be able to touch the cost. You’re gonna wonder what you were thinking when believed your country had the best healthcare system in the world, even though it was the only advanced democracy in the world that didn’t provide universal care, even though it devoted fifty percent more of its economy than those other countries to pay for a system that left fifty million people uninsured, and even though there were massive layers of unnecessary and harmful private sector bureaucracy skimming hundreds of billions of dollars of profits out of the system in the name of free enterprise.

One day you’re gonna wake up too tired to go to work anymore. You’re gonna want to retire in dignity but will be left instead to laugh bitterly at the cruelty of that joke. And you’re gonna wonder what in the world you had been thinking voting for a president who’s primary goal was to allow Wall Street to raid Social Security, destroying what had once been considered the most successful domestic program in human history.

One day you’re gonna wake up and wish that it wasn’t so bloody hot, and that there weren’t so many diseases and species eradications and violent storms lashing the planet. And maybe you’ll even remember that you once supported a government that lied about the very existence of global warming - back when it might have been curtailed - a government that scuttled the barest remedy for the problem in order to protect oil company profits.

One day you’re gonna wake up and wish you had a government that could simply and competently do the basic things it was designed for. A government that could protect you from foreign attack, that could come to your rescue after a devastating hurricane, that could properly manage a new program or other people’s security. An administration that didn’t pervert the purpose of every agency within the government to its opposite, using civil rights lawyers to fight civil rights, for example, or the EPA to protect polluters.

One day you’re gonna wake up and cry out for simple justice, blindly applied without bias. And perhaps you’ll remember when that principle died. When your country stood by and watched the politicization of its judicial system for purposes of partisanship, and said nothing. When it stood by and watched its highest law enforcement officials in the land lie about their failing memory of events and pretended to believe that was acceptable.

One day you’re gonna wake up and wish that you weren’t being drafted to go fight wars you don’t believe in. You’ll remember how soldiers were sent to their deaths for lies. You’ll remember how badly they were treated when they came home maimed and twisted. You’ll remember how real, patriotic, former soldiers were mocked and humiliated by dress-up, unpatriotic, former non-soldiers. And suddenly you’ll understand why no one would volunteer for the military anymore, and why people like you had to be drafted.

One day you’re gonna wake up and want very badly to run outside and scream in anger about a government that long ago stopped serving your interests in favor of the narrow interests of a tiny oligarchy. But instead you’ll stay inside and keep your scream tucked safely in your belly. Because you’ll know that in your country dissent has long since been outlawed, on pain of torture and death. You’ll remember concepts like due process, limitations on government search, seizure and wiretapping, habeas corpus, trial by peers, legal representation and prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment as historical artifacts no longer even taught in schools.

On day you’re gonna wake up and want so badly to change governments. You’re gonna treasure the concept of democracy like no Soviet dissident ever did. You’re gonna crave the opportunity to own your own government, to make your own societal choices, to make a change of direction never before so desperately necessary. And you’re gonna wonder why you didn’t speak up as you watched first-hand the dismantling of the democracy you had been handed by previous generations of patriots. You’re gonna wish you had been patriotic enough yourself to demand, above all else, free and fair elections, and you’re gonna shake your head in puzzlement at how you stood by watching in silence those that patently were not.

One day you’re gonna wake up and want to get the hell out of your rotting, repressive country. You’re gonna remember a time when that wasn’t true. But, oddly enough, you’ll find that other countries remember too. They’ll remember your country’s arrogance, its unilateralism, its walls, its racism, and its politicized abuse of immigrants. And they’ll remember how your government undermined and violently replaced theirs whenever corporations from your country had their profits threatened. You’re gonna want to leave, but there will be nowhere you’ll be welcome. You’re gonna find out that walls can face both directions.

One day you’re gonna wake up in a hostile world where your country no longer has any friends. There will be governments of other countries - former long-standing allies - that cannot afford to have anything to do with you, lest their publics angrily remove them from office for collaborating with a country as hated as yours. Nor will those governments trust yours anyway. They will perhaps possess intelligence that could save your life, but they will not share it. They will possess forces that could help you survive real security threats, but they will not provide them. Your country will have become an international pariah, the South Africa of the twenty-first century.

And because no one will assist you, one day you’re gonna wake up fearing for your life as your country is brutally attacked by angry militants deploying weapons of mass destruction against your cities. Long dormant connections in your brain will resurface, and you will dimly understand why. On this day - perhaps March 20, 2023 - you might be assisted in your comprehension by the message of one of the attackers, someone whose family your country callously destroyed in its mission accomplished in Iraq, and who spent the next twenty years plotting this day’s revenge. And you will wonder again why you stood by as your country attacked Iraq on a completely bogus pretext. You’ll remember applauding when this mailed fist was long ago sent. And, just as it comes hurling back in your direction at a lethal velocity, stamped “Return to Sender”, you’ll wonder what you were thinking. And you’ll realize just how much you weren’t.

One day you’re gonna wake up, America, and you’re gonna find out what was happening while you were sprawled on the couch watching endless mind-numbing loops of CSI, Desperate Housewives or Dancing with the Stars.

One day you’re gonna wake up and realize that catching all the action during week seven of the 2011 NFL season really wasn’t so critical in the greater scheme of things after all.

One day you’re gonna wake up and wished you’d invested a little more energy into monitoring and choosing the people who made monumental decisions on your behalf.

One day, with a flash of remorse greater than you thought it possible that one human vessel could contain, you’ll remember the ignored warning shots across your bow. Moments later, you’ll discover the human capacity for searing remorse is actually even greater still, as you contemplate your inattention even to the shots that were fired right through the bow. With a fury you would yesterday have thought yourself incapable of, you’ll hurriedly attempt to affix Band-Aids to the tattered splinters remaining from your country’s once sturdy hull. But you’ll learn quickly the toll of those years spent wasted in a civic coma. You’ll find that no amount of patchwork can any longer save this sinking ship from its appointment with the dustbin of history.

In shame, you’ll regret the callous arrogance with which you laughingly dismissed those who sounded the early clarion call. “We are destroying ourselves”, they tried to tell you. But even on the rare occasion when you roused yourself from your stupor long enough to learn the slightest bit about the very threats that jeopardized your life and that of your species, still you found it more reassuring to follow the blustering worst amongst us, with their patently absurd pretended confidence, and their ever constant resort to the cheapest of false solutions, and the rudest of demeanors.

One day, you’ll desperately search for hope of any sort, but none will remain. Nothing will be left to save you.

One day you’ll realize that once there were solutions, but that that day is now long past. You’ll see that human technological capacity ran its evolutionary race with wisdom, and the latter came in second. You’ll sadly realize that you stood by while your country led the once great tool-making species to its own destruction.

One day you’re gonna wake up, America, and realize how far it’s all gone. But if that day isn’t very soon, it won’t matter.

Because one day you’re gonna wake up, and it will be far, far too late.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers’ reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/04/962/

Dear Senator Leahy

2007-05-03T08:46:00.000-04:00

Subpena them (the Bush Crime Gang)?

Heck, why wait? Just do what THEY do, snoop.

They data mine their fellow citizens phone, email, snail mail, library records, credit card purchases... what sets them above their fellow citizens?

Time for some fairness.
Equality under law(lessness.)

They don't want to show up to answer questions: how about some extraordinary rendition?
They'd do it to us in a New York minute.

They don't want to swear their testimony?
Waterboards.
It's not torture.

What's good for the goose...

Knitting away, beneath the guillotine...

no meter on the oil pumps

2007-05-02T09:08:00.000-04:00

Refresh my memory... do you recall on the evening of "Shock and Awe" when Dubya got on television before the world to talk to the people of soon to be occupied Iraq, and all he said to them was to not disturb the oil?

And after the preemptive invasion, when the museums and government offices were being looted ("stuff happens"), the Ministry of Oil was the only building in Iraq being protected by American troops?

Remember the insider joke ... "Operation Iraqi Liberation"?

Remember the mainstream media echo chamber trumpeting the "oil for food scandal"? At least the children of Iraq were obese under Saddam. Today with the "oil for chaos" scandal that is not being mentioned in the American Idol obsessed press, Iraqi children are facing water borne parasitic disease, dissappeared medical service, and malnutrition.
Mission Accomplished.

Tell me, how much more looting do Bush's and Cheney's cronies deserve? Will they ever have enough? Fu*%ing insatiable wolves, indeed, that's what they are.

Tell me, how much more chaos would there be if American troops left right now? Will the twit Neocons EVER spill enough blood and shoot enough guns to prop up their manhood?

Sounds like PLENTY of chaos right now.
But, refresh my memory... didn't the NeoCon ideologist Michael Ledeen say that chaos was their goal?
Yes he did.

Dear Senator Levin, I heard today that your biggest financial support comes from AIPAC.
How does the Israeli lobby serve the citizens of the state of Michigan?
Is that why you are the flip side of the same coin? Heads we get crony capitalism and corporate welfare and a fascist military industrial economy, tails we get the same thing.
Why DO you rubber stamp the worst administration in history?

How Much Iraqi Crude Oil is Being Stolen? Mystery of the Missing Meters
By Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch
Posted on April 30, 2007(link)The line of ships at the Al Basra Oil Terminal (ABOT) stretches south to the horizon, patiently waiting in the searing heat of the Northern Arabian Gulf as four giant supertankers load up. Close by, two more tankers fill up at the smaller Khawr Al Amaya Oil Terminal (KAAOT). Guarding both terminals are dozens of heavily-armed U.S. Navy troops and Iraqi Marines who live on the platforms.

These two offshore terminals, a maze of pipes and precarious metal walkways, deliver some 1.6 million barrels of crude oil, at least 85 percent of Iraq's output, to buyers from all over the world. If the southern oil fields are the heart of Iraq's economy, its main arteries are three 40-plus inch pipelines that stretch some 52 miles from Iraq's wells to the ports.

Heavily armed soldiers spend their days at the oil terminals scanning the horizon looking for suicide bombers and stray fishing dhows (boats). Meanwhile, right under their noses, smugglers are suspected to be diverting an estimated billions of dollars worth of crude onto tankers because the oil metering system that is supposed monitor how much crude flows into and out of ABOT and KAAOT -- has not worked since the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Officials blame the four-year delay in repairing the relatively simple system on "security problems." Others point to the failed efforts of the two U.S. companies hired to repair the southern oil fields, fix the two terminals, and the meters: Halliburton of Houston, Texas, and Parsons of Pasadena, California.

The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) is scheduled to publish a report this spring that is expected criticize the companies' failure to complete the work.

Rumors are rife among suspicious Iraqis about the failure to measure the oil flow. "Iraq is the victim of the biggest robbery of its oil production in modern history," blazed a March 2006 headline in Azzaman, Iraq's most widely read newspaper. A May 2006 study of oil production and export figures by Platt's Oilgram News, an industry magazine, showed that up to $3 billion a year is unaccounted for.

"Iraqi oil is regularly smuggled out of the country in many different ways," an oil merchant in Amman told the Nation (U.S.) magazine last month. "Emir al-Hakim [the head of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq] is spending all his time in Basra selling oil as if it were his own. People there call him Uday al-Hakim, meaning he is behaving the same way Uday Saddam Hussein was acting. Other merchants like myself have to work through him with the big deals or smuggle small quantities on our own. The petroleum is now divided among political parties in power."

The resource curse

The smuggling and black market operations bear striking parallels to Saddam Hussein's tactics for circumventing the UN embargo. Saddam was accused of selling some $5.7 billion worth of petroleum products on the black market over the six years of the Oil-for-Food program while United Nations inspectors turned a blind eye. Today, his successors stand accused of similar abuses.

Iraq sits on 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the third largest in the world (behind Saudi Arabia and Canada). From a society that once used its oil revenue to create a social welfare state that provided education, health care and social services, the country has plummeted into the ranks of the poorest countries of the world.

Economists call this the "resource curse." Those blessed with non-renewable resources often benefit the least, because a few wealthy people control the resources, or war prevents almost anyone from the benefiting.

Iraq's main revenue source - earnings from the export sales of petroleum, petroleum products and natural gas - is currently managed by the Development Fund for Iraq. DFI's May 21, 2003 document, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483, assigns this money to benefit the Iraqi people. The resolution replaces the previous United Nations-run Oil-for-Food scheme that lasted from 1997 until the March 2003 invasion.

Almost four years after the DFI was created, officially logged crude sales have generated more than $80 billion. The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) managed the DFI from the immediate aftermath of Saddam's removal until June 28, 2004, when the CPA was disbanded. During those 14 months, the CPA spent $19.6 billion of Iraq's DFI funds. The three succeeding governments have been officially in charge of the DFI revenues, although the influence of the U.S. military and political advisors has remained significant throughout. In the 32 months after the CPA left, the three governments spent $47 billion more.

Halliburton & Parsons

U.S. contractors have played a key role in the repair and upgrading of Iraq's oil infrastructure and expected the industry to pay for reconstruction. In January 2004, under project Restore Iraqi Oil II (RIO II), the Bush administration contracted with Halliburton to fix southern Iraq's oil fields and with Parsons to handle the northern fields. The two companies were supposed to be supervised by yet another contractor, New Jersey-based Foster Wheeler. (The first RIO contract was the infamous, secret no-bid contract issued to Halliburton before the invasion of Iraq. Although RIO II was competitively bid, Sheryl Tappan, a former Bechtel employee wrote a book criticizing the award as unfair.)

Halliburton and Parsons have long histories in Iraq, going back more than 40 years. Brown & Root, which is now part of Halliburton , began work in Iraq in 1961, while Parsons dipped into Iraq's oil sector in the 1950s. Foster Wheeler dates its work in Iraq to the 1930s.

These companies have a lot of experience at the terminals where the black market now thrives. Indeed, Halliburton built the ABOT terminal, then known as Mina al-Bakr, in the early1970s. After it was damaged during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Halliburton repaired the terminal, before it was bombed yet again during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

The Khor al-Amaya oil terminal also saw a similar cycle of destruction and rebuilding. Built with Halliburton 's help in 1973, it was heavily damaged by Iranian commandos during the Iran-Iraq war, then again during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, and most recently in May 2006 by a major fire that destroyed 70 percent of its facilities. During the sanctions, Ingersoll Dresser Pump Company, a Halliburton subsidiary, had a secret contract to sell Iraq spare parts, compressors, and firefighting equipment for the refurbishment.

( Halliburton also a long history near the Turkish port of Ceyhan, from where Iraq sells oil produced at Kirkuk in northern Iraq. Halliburton runs the nearby U.S. military base at Incirlik, which was the staging ground for Operation Northern Watch that provided air protection for the Kurds during the 1990s.)

Measuring the oil

With billions of dollars to spend and extensive experience with oil infrastructure and Iraqi ports, Haliburton and Parsons seem unable to deal with the routine problem of broken meters at the Southern Iraq terminals.

The kinds of meters they were supposed to repair or replace at ABOT are commonly found at hundreds of similar sites around the world. Because they are custom-built, shipped, then assembled and calibrated on site, the process can take up to a year. But the probelm has persisted for four years.

After the 2003 invasion, the meters appear to have been turned off and there have since been no reliable estimates of how much crude has been shipped from the southern oil fields. (The northern oil fields in Kirkuk, which supply the Beiji refinery in Iraq and export crude to the Turkish port of Adana, has reliable metering but little oil to measure since insurgent attacks largely shut down the facility.)

Lieutenant Aaron Bergman, the U.S. Navy officer in charge of Mobile Security Squadron 7 at ABOT, says export authorities have "guesstimated" how much is being sold, with a back-of-the-envelope formula: Every centimeter a tanker lowers into the water equals 6,000 barrels of oil cargo.

"So you can imagine," he said earlier this month to Stars & Stripes, a newspaper serving the U.S. military, the numbers could be off, "A couple of inches could equal 180,000 barrels of fuel."

"I would say probably between 200,000 and 500,000 barrels a day is probably unaccounted for in Iraq," Mikel Morris, who worked for the Iraq Reconstruction Management Organization (IRMO) at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, told KTVT, a Texas television station.

Neither US officials nor contractors have provided good reasons why, four years into the US occupation, the meters have not been calibrated, repaired, or replaced. One excuse is that the job of calibration requires special devices to assess the current meters and security issues make importing these devises problematic. Yet that and other security-related explanations fall apart given that the oil terminals are under 24 hour high security guard, lie more than 50 miles off-shore, and are accessible only by helicopter or ship.

There are two possible explanations: that the project has been delayed by bureaucracy or that vested interests benefiting from the lack of oil metering (such as smugglers or corrupt officials) have prevented the project from moving forward.

Skyrocketing Costs

The RIO II project, which includes the meter repair work, has come under much criticism, although specific details are scarce.

For example, the Bush administration issued Halliburton the RIO II order in January 2004 and gave detailed task orders in June. But despite not starting work until November 2004, the company charged the government millions of dollars for engineers who sat idle. Halliburton 's $296 million bill included at least 55 percent overhead. (In an estimate due later this month, SIGIR may predicts even higher overhead costs.)

A Parsons joint venture (with Worley of Australia), was also issued a contract in January 2004, given detailed task orders in June, and started work in July 2004. It has also been accused of charging high overhead costs while idle, although not as much as Halliburton . SIGIR estimate pegs its overhead at 43 percent.

In addition, in a series of scathing internal reports uncovered by Congressman Henry Waxman, supervisors Foster Wheeler criticized Halliburton 's cost. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a "cure" notice on January 29, 2005, ordering Halliburton to do a better job or else. After Halliburton did improve its cost controls, the military turned over the southern oil work to Parsons in mid 2005.

When Parsons took over the contracts, two years after the invasion, it hired a Saudi Arabian sub-contractor, Alaa for Industry, to help repair or replace the meters.

The turbine meters were shipped to Kuwait for repairs but do not appear to have been fixed in a timely manner, although some have been fixed and re-installed earlier this year. Unofficial sources suggest that the Kuwaiti bureaucracy delayed the repair work: "The real reason for the hindrance to work at the ABOT is because Kuwait has a vested interest in minimizing Iraqi oil exports," an anonymous source who worked on the project said. His claim could not be verified.

In mid-September 2006, the Iraqi oil ministry abruptly announced that it would pull the plug on the oil metering project, making future monitoring even less certain.

Asim Jihad, the oil ministry spokesman, told Al Hayat: "The American company had failed in keeping its promise to finish installing these meters; also, refusing to reveal the exact cost, except for saying that it is executing it within the American grant to Iraq and the sum of that grant is unknown to us too. This relieves the ministry from its obligation to it. Besides, many international companies presented good offers to implement the project in a record time due to its importance."

The oil ministry then invited British Petroleum and Shell to plan a comprehensive national metering project that would cover not only the oil terminals, but also the productions wells and the even the refineries.

A SIGIR team traveled to ABOT in November 2006 to check on progress. Its unpublished report suggests that the work was less than half complete.

Suddenly, in December 2006, a high-level U.S. team traveled out to ABOT to inspect the meters. In a little-noticed announcement issued on a Saturday just before Christmas, John Sickman, the resident oil expert at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, said the meters had been fixed and were working fine.

"The measurement using the existing turbine meters and displacement meters at the offshore terminal at ABOT is transparent and the measurement devices are more than adequate," Sickman was quoted in the press release. "Furthermore, the crude oil vessels have measurement and quality samplers."

Indeed this is how the Dutch company Saybolt measured oil export under the United Nations Oil for Food program. The problem even today, according to experts consulted for this report, is that the meters have yet to be calibrated, so the data are basically useless.

Even if the meters are working properly, smuggling could still occur. "It's easy to steal crude if you knew what you were doing," Don Deaver, a petroleum metering expert who worked for Exxon for 33 years, said. "If you meaure too low or too high, someone will lose and some will one gain. It's why you need professionals who understand how the meters work to make sure that nothing is being lost or stolen."

U.S. government officials claim that little is being stolen. SGS (a British consultancy) "is providing independent third party loading certifications onsite for the customers. This, coupled with the recent installation of ultrasonic meter provides more than redundant measurement capability," said Sickman in December.

Days after the press release, in early January 2007, Parsons began work on the meters under a $57.8 million U.S. government-funded contract supervised by Major Dale Winger of the Joint Contracting Command in Basra. Almost as soon as work started, Winger was replaced by Lieutenant Commander Brian Schorn. Reached for this article, Schorn said he was not up to speed on what work had been done, and referred questions to his "front-office" in Baghdad at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Parsons Iraq Joint Venture spokesman Don Lassus also refused to comment. The contract with the military does not permit the release of "any unclassified information," he said, without prior approval of the military.

Today no government officials have been able to establish conclusively whether oil is being smuggled or not. Even the future of the oil metering remains unclear. The latest report issued by SIGIR in January 2007 notes that repair and rehabilitation work at ABOT is scheduled to be finished by May 2007, but "it is unclear whether this project will be completed because of de-obligation requirements" that is to say that the funding could be cut.

Pratap Chatterjee is managing editor of CorpWatch and the author of 'Iraq Inc.' (Seven Stories Press, September 2004).

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/51218/

May Day, May Day

2007-05-01T08:14:00.001-04:00

refresh my memory about Tillman and Lynch

2007-04-27T09:12:00.001-04:00

I recall reading that Tillman was becoming disillusioned, and the news was that Pat was planning to meet with his Congressman when his tour was over, just before he was 'killed'.
Coincidentally, the War Party needed a big story for Civilian Propaganda to divert attention from the emerging Abu Grahib story (remember, they had plenty of lead time and released the torture pictures on their own schedule.)

Timing is everything.
It was all fishy to me from Day One.

And...
I recall reading that Jessica was portrayed as a naive young "blond" who "took a wrong turn" and ended up in a nest of Iraqis. I wondered why in the hell she didn't follow her GPS as she was trained to do?

Or if... her GPS directed her to make the wrong-way turn, who could have programmed it to do that? Wasn't that convenient, if you needed her character for a "story"?

I remember reading her Iraqi doctor's story and how she wasn't mistreated at all, and that her "rescuers" had to wait a whole day to get the proper press in to film the rescue.
Coincidentally, the War Party needed a romantic war story that would appeal to the young right, for the Office of Civilian Propaganda to divert attention from the Rachael Corry story that was playing in the foreign press and appealing to the young left. Their brave young girl soldier story would suck all of the air out of the brave young girl peace-nic being bulldozed by the Israelis story.

Timing is everything in war. You do bad things, make contracts, tell lies, steal elections, roll over innocents, let others be killed, make more contracts and then you Move On. Apologies? if necessary. No reparations.

they look like damn nice kids

2007-04-27T08:53:00.000-04:00

Living in Hell, brought to them by the U.S. of A.

Follow the link to watch the series.
I am so sorry, I wish my fellow Americans were sorry.
We turned nice college kids into war zone survivors. Go, watch the series.

Dear Senator McCain,

2007-04-27T08:46:00.000-04:00

If, as you suggested to Jon Stewart, when we pull out of Iraq the enemy will follow our troops home to attack us here... then won't our high tech Homeland Security watchdogs stop them in their tracks? Maybe we can shoot them with one of those $8 Million dollar per unit armed glider Reapers that hover over our borders sensing warm bodies to shoot just like in video games.
Or we can use that $20 Billion V22 Osprey, when and if ever it finally works.
(Ah, nothing like the military-industrial-complex to keep the economy humming.)

Bringing the rodents out of the swamp will prove that all the taxpayer money you spent on our brand new shiny Office of Homeland Security was justified! After all, if you store the cake under the sink, that's where the rats go, or whatever William Krystol said, and we sure did put a lot of "cake under the sink" (we "lost" about $8 Billion in cash) in Iraq.
And think of the great Stories of Heroism our Office of Civilian Propaganda could craft if we lured the enemy here! It would rouse the citizenry like a good story of a Hometown Football Hero soldier getting killed by enemy fire or a naive blond Little Gal recruit being rescued by our big strong Marines, whatever.
And that would justify all the money Dubya spent on civilian propaganda, too!
See, things do work out in the end for you rich guys, you just have to suffer a little while, while your bank accounts multiply like fishes.

Oh yes... and John, the IED joke wasn't any funnier than the Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran song, or the Springtime Carpet Deals in the Baghdad Market! shtick.

Senator McCain, you are whistling in a graveyard on the bones of hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of an invasion based on lies. You sound like an ass.

your rights under the torture regime

2007-04-26T07:43:00.001-04:00

a case for impeachment

2007-04-26T07:38:00.000-04:00

****************************
Published on Thursday, October 12, 2006 by Ted Rall
America's Nuremberg Laws
The End of the U.S. as a Civilized Nation
by Ted Rall

SEATTLE - Students of historical hysteria immediately saw 9/11 as America's version of the Reichstag Fire. Both incidents were organic acts of terrorism (contrary to popular misconception, the Nazis didn't set the 1933 fire) seized upon by power-hungry government officials to justify the crushing of political dissent and the rolling back of civil liberties. Hitler began marching his people into the abyss immediately upon seizing power in 1933, but Nazi Germany's fate as a rogue nation wasn't sealed until two years later, in the late summer of 1935.

Before then there had been heinous violations of human rights. Nazi authorities detained thousands of socialists and communists in concentration camps (death camps weren't built until 1941). Many were tortured; some died in custody. Stormtroopers enforced state-sanctioned boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses. Brownshirts beat Jews in the streets as the police stood by and watched. Ignoring Germany's treaty obligations, Hitler poured millions into the armed forces and threatened to use them against Germany's neighbors. No one could doubt that Germany was in the hands of militaristic right-wing thugs.

Until 1935, however, the home of Goethe and Beethoven had not entirely abandoned the universal values accepted by civilized states. True, top German officials and street-level Nazi Party members were breaking all sorts of laws, including constitutional protections against racial and religious discrimination. That's precisely the point: the law endured. Pre-Nazi legal infrastructure and laws, including the 1920s-era "Weimar" Constitution--still the Western world's gold standard for protecting individual rights and privileges--remained in force. Technically, anyway.

Had there been the political will, Hitler and his goons could have been arrested and tried under German law. The German government was a lost cause, but the German nation still had a (slim) chance. Until 1935.

That's when Germany officially codified the Nazis' uncivilized anti-Semitism by passing the Nuremberg Laws. Jews were stripped of citizenship and banned from marrying or dating non-Jews. The laws were a form of legalized harassment, prohibiting Jews from displaying German flags or shopping in stores at certain times. Turning Jews into legal pariahs paved the way for the Holocaust. More immediately, the barbaric ipso facto policies of the Nazi government had corrupted Germany's lofty and admirable system of legal guarantees. Even though German law hadn't been of much help to Jews before--well, there had been the occasional arrest and prosecution of a brownshirt who had gone "too far"--now there was every reason for them to succumb to hopelessness. Germany was no longer a civilized nation in the clutches of gangsters. It had become a gangster nation.

Similarly, the recently passed Military Commissions Act removes the United States from the ranks of civilized nations. It codifies racial and political discrimination, legalizes kidnapping and torture of those the government deems its political enemies, and eliminates habeas corpus--the ancient precept that prevents the police from arresting and holding you without cause--a basic protection common to all (other) modern legal systems, and one that dates to the Magna Carta.

Between 2001 and 2006, George W. Bush worked tirelessly to eliminate freedoms and liberties Americans have long taken for granted. The Bush Administration's CIA, mercenary and military state terrorists kidnapped thousands of innocent people and held them at secret prisons around the world for months and years at a time. These people were never charged with a crime. (There was good reason for that. As the government itself admitted, fewer than ten had actually done anything wrong.) Yet hundreds, maybe even thousands, were tortured.

Under American law these despicable acts were illegal. They were, by definition, un-American. Although it didn't help the dozens of Bush torture victims who died from beatings and drowning, the pre-Bush American judicial system worked. The Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court handed down one decision after another ordering the White House to give its "detainees" trials or let them go. For a brief, shining moment, it looked like there was hope for the U.S. to find its way back to the light.

Now, thanks to a gullible passel of Republican senators and an unhinged leader who is banking that Americans are just as passive as the Germans of the mid-1930s, we have our own Nuremberg Laws.

Under the terrifying terms of the radical new Military Commissions Act, Bush can declare anyone--including you--an "unlawful enemy combatant," a term that doesn't exist in U.S. or international law. All he has to do is sign a piece of paper claiming that you "purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States." The law's language is brilliantly vague, allowing the president to imprison--for the rest of his or her life--anyone, including a U.S. citizen, from someone who makes a contribution to a group he disapproves of to a journalist who criticizes the government.

Although Bush and his top officials ordered and endorsed torture, the courts had found that it was illegal under U.S. law and treaty obligations. Now torture is, for the first time, legal.

"Over all," reports The New York Times, "the legislation reallocates power among the three branches of government, taking authority away from the judiciary and handing it to the president." Bruce Ackerman, professor of law and political science at Yale, notes that the MCA trashes the centuries-old right of a prisoner to petition to the courts: "If Congress can strip courts of jurisdiction over cases because it fears their outcome, judicial independence is threatened."

How did we get here? Good Germans--and many of them were decent, moral people--asked themselves the same thing. The answer is incrementalism, the tendency of radical change to manifest itself in bits and pieces. People who should have known better--journalists, Democrats, and Republicans who are more loyal to their country than their party--allowed Bush and his neofascist gangsters to hijack our republic and its values. They weren't as bad as Bush. They just couldn't see the big picture.

Just as no single rollback led marked the transition from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich, no event is individually responsible for America's shocking five-year transformation from beacon of freedom to autocratic torture state. It wasn't just letting Bush get away with his 2000 coup d'état. It wasn't just us standing by as he deliberately allowed his family friend Osama bin Laden to escape, or as he invaded Afghanistan, or as he built the concentration camps at Guantánamo and elsewhere, or even Iraq. It was all of those things collectively.

The Military Commissions Act signals that our traditional system of beliefs and government has irrevocably devolved into moral bankruptcy. Memo to Senator McCain: You don't negotiate with terrorists, and you don't compromise with torturers.

It doesn't matter how much food aid we ship to the victims of the next global natural disaster, or how diplomatic our next president is, or whether we come to regret what we have done in the name of law and order. Our laws permit kidnapping, torture and murder. Our laws deny access to the courts. The United States has ceded the moral high ground to its enemies.

We are done.

Ted Rall is the author of the new graphic travelogue "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?"

anything goes in war, that's why we have wars

2007-04-26T07:25:00.001-04:00

by Anti-Flag
******************************
The war resisters league has posted their new 2008 pie chart...
http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm
******************************
Viscount Lacarte* talking about Vonnegut (link) on NewCritics.com

"I'm a blogger, not a writer..."* Not so, Viscount.

Our culture has seemingly become inured to the horrors of war. Even now as the tide is ever so slowly turning, many people still don’t know what war is. What it does to people.

Funny thing about these conservatives. They decry liberals and intellectuals for being relativists. You know. “The buck has to stop someplace. Everything can’t be ok I’m_ok_you’re_ ok ok. Ok?”

Except when it comes to war. In a war, you can just kill people because that is what war is. War is the ultimate suspension of morality. Everything is ok if it is a war. It’s like hall pass in the school of decency. It’s like a get_out_of_jail_free card in “Monopoly – The Jesus Edition.” Soldiers can break into someone’s house, kill everyone, and then go, “Oops. Wrong house.” And then move on. Let’s go have a beer and talk to the Chaplin.

Or you can bomb an entire non-military target city famous for its delicate artwork and historical architecture, and kill 100,000 people.

WWII. Maybe it could have been avoided, but since it wasn’t we did what we had to do. I don’t know if we had to bomb Dresden or not. I don’t know if we had to drop the second nuke on Japan or not. Doesn’t matter now. That shit happens in war. Which is why us asshole, pussy, un-American, un-patriotic etc. liberals believe it should be the last resort after all other alternatives have been exhausted.

Maybe life is just a collection of moments, and maybe we just have to struggle through the bad ones and enjoy the good ones.

Maybe, just maybe next time we’ll remember this time - and say “no.”

Laura and Dubya on "Sacrifice"

2007-04-26T07:20:00.000-04:00

ANN CURRY: Do you know the American people are suffering… watching [Iraq]?

LAURA BUSH: Oh, I know that very much, and, believe me, no suffers more than their president and I do when we watch this. And certainly the commander-in-chief who has asked our military to go into harm’s way.

AC: What do you think the American people need to know…

LB: Well, I hope they do know the burden of worry that’s on his shoulders every single day for our troops. And I think they do. I think if they don’t, they’re not seeing what the real responsibilities of our president are.

AC: It must be hard for you to watch him in this.

LB: It’s hard. Of course, it’s absolutely hard.

Privatizing the military - a hallmark of a fascist state

2007-04-23T11:30:00.000-04:00

Nice Job, NPR - exposing another powerful twit

2007-04-19T07:13:00.000-04:00

Morning Edition made me fall out of bed laughing this a.m.

Steve Inskeep's interview with Doug Feith reveals our most innerest insider, highest super duper secretest know-all, Wizard of Oz to be a dweep of a twit.

Mike Moore exposed Paul Wolfowitz for a comb licking twit before the war.
William Krystol exposed himself to be a twitchy twit in his frequent talking head appearances on the MSM.
Rummy Rumsfield exposed himself to be a lyrical twit in his press briefings.
Rush Limbaugh's sexual twitdom was found in his bag at the airport.
Karl Rove rapped himself into pillsbury doughboy twit status forever at the press dinner.
Shrub has always been a frat boy twit.
I always wonder why Republican women look like mean, unhappy mothers.
Because Republican men are, basically, twits.

and No One Ever explained Jeff Gannon/Guckert.
I think he was Cheney's boytoy.

The GOP is perverted in every sense of the word.
These are your leaders, people. Rich Twits with Power.

Now for the cost of not believing the real experts:

Iraq: the hidden cost of the war
Andrew Stephen
Published 12 March 2007

America won't simply be paying with its dead. The Pentagon is trying to silence economists who predict that several decades of care for the wounded will amount to an unbelievable $2.5 trillion.

They roar in every day, usually direct from the Landstuhl US air-force base in the Rhineland: giant C-17 cargo planes capable of lifting and flying the 65-tonne M1 Abrams tank to battlefields anywhere in the world. But Landstuhl is the first staging post for transporting most of the American wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan back to the United States, and these planes act as CCATs ("critical care air transport") with their AETs - "aeromedical evacuation teams" of doctors, nurses and medical technicians, whose task is to make sure that gravely wounded US troops arrive alive and fit enough for intensive treatment at the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre, just six miles up the road from me in Washington.

These days it is de rigueur for all politicians, ranging from President Bush and Ibrahim al-Jaafari (Iraq's "prime minister") to junior congressmen, to visit the 113-acre Walter Reed complex to pay tribute to the valour of horribly wounded soldiers. Last Christmas, the centre was so overwhelmed by the 500,000 cards and presents it received for wounded soldiers that it announced it could accept no more.

Yet the story of the US wounded reveals yet another deception by the Bush administration, masking monumental miscalculations that will haunt generations to come. Thanks to the work of a Harvard professor and former Clinton administration economist named Linda Bilmes, and some other hard-working academics, we have discovered that the administration has been putting out two entirely separate and conflicting sets of numbers of those wounded in the wars.

This might sound like chicanery by George W Bush and his cronies - or characteristic incompetence - but Bilmes and Professor Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist from Columbia University, have established not only that the number wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan is far higher than the Pentagon has been saying, but that looking after them alone could cost present and future US taxpayers a sum they estimate to be $536bn, but which could get considerably bigger still. Just one soldier out of the 1.4 million troops so far deployed who has returned with a debilitating brain injury, for example, may need round-the-clock care for five, six, or even seven decades. In present-day money, according to one study, care for that soldier alone will cost a minimum of $4.3m.

However, let us first backtrack to 2002-2003 to try to establish why the administration's sums were so wildly off-target. Documents just obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show how completely lost the Bush administration was in Neverland when it came to Iraq: Centcom, the main top-secret military planning unit at Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, predicted in its war plan that only 5,000 US troops would be required in Iraq by the end of 2006.

Rummy's deputy Paul Wolfowitz was such a whizz at the economics of it all that he confidently told us that Iraq would "really finance its own reconstruction". Rumsfeld himself reported that the administration had come up with "a number that's something under $50bn" as the cost of the war. Larry Lindsey, then assistant to the president on economic policy at the White House, warned that it might actually soar to as much as $200bn - with the result that Bush did as he habitually does with those who do not produce convenient facts and figures to back up his fantasies: he sacked him.

From official statistics supplied by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, we now know that the Iraq war is costing roughly $200m a day, or $6bn every month; the total bill so far is $400bn. But, in their studies, Bilmes and Stiglitz consider three scenarios that were not even conceivable to Bush, Rummy, Wolfowitz et al back in 2003. In the first, incurring the lowest future costs, troops will start to be withdrawn this year and be out by 2010. The second assumes that there will be a gradual withdrawal that will be complete by 2015. The third envisages the participation of two million servicemen and women, with the war going on past 2016.

Estimating long-term costs using even the second, moderate scenario, Bilmes tells me: "I think we are now approaching a figure of $2.5 trillion." This, she says, "includes three kinds of costs. It includes the cash costs of running the combat operations, the long-term costs of replenishing military equipment and taking care of the veterans, and [increased costs] at the Pentagon. And then it includes the economic cost, which is the differential between reservists' pay in their civilian jobs and what they're paid in the military - and the macroecono mic costs, such as the percentage of the oil-price increase."

Let me pause to explain those deceptive figures. Look at the latest official toll of US fatalities and wounded in the media, and you will see something like 3,160 dead and 23,785 wounded (that "includes 13,250 personnel who returned to duty within 72 hours", the Washington Post told us helpfully on 4 March). From this, you might assume that only 11,000 or so troops, in effect, have been wounded in Iraq. But Bilmes discovered that the Bush administration was keeping two separate sets of statistics of those wounded: one (like the above) issued by the Pentagon and therefore used by the media, and the other by the Department of Veterans Affairs - a government department autonomous from the Pentagon. At the beginning of this year, the Pentagon was putting out a figure of roughly 23,000 wounded, but the VA was quietly saying that more than 50,000 had, in fact, been wounded.

Casualty conspiracy

To draw attention to her academic findings, Bilmes wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times of 5 January 2007 in which she quoted the figure of "more than 50,000 wounded Iraq war soldiers". The reaction from the Pentagon was fury. An assistant secretary there named Dr William Winkenwerder phoned her personally to complain. Bilmes recalls: "He said, 'Where did you get those numbers from?'" She explained to Winkenwerder that the 50,000 figure came from the VA, and faxed him copies of official US government documents that proved her point. Winkenwerder backed down.

Matters did not rest there. Despite its independence from the Pentagon, the VA is run by Robert James Nicholson, a former Republican Party chairman and Bush's loyal political appointee. Following Bilmes's exchange with Winkenwerder - on 10 January, to be precise - the number of wounded listed on the VA website dropped from 50,508 to 21,649. The Bush administration had, once again, turned reality on its head to concur with its claims. "The whole thing is scary," Bilmes says. "I have never been conspiracy-minded, but watching them change the numbers on the website - it's extraordinary."

What Bilmes had discovered was that the tally of US fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan included the outcome of "non-hostile actions", most commonly vehicle accidents. But the Pentagon's statistics of the wounded did not. Even troops incapacitated for life in Iraq or Afghanistan - but not in "hostile situations" - were not being counted, although they will require exactly the same kind of medical care back home as soldiers similarly wounded in battle. Bilmes and Stiglitz had set out, meantime, to explore the ratio of wounded to deaths in previous American wars. They found that in the First World War, on average 1.8 were wounded for every fatality; in the Second World War, 1.6; in Korea, 2.8; in Vietnam, 2.6; and, in the first Gulf war in 1991, 1.2. In this war, 21st-century medical care and better armour have inflated the numbers of the wounded-but-living, leading Bilmes to an astounding conclusion: for every soldier dying in Iraq or Afghanistan today, 16 are being wounded. The Pentagon insists the figure is nearer nine - but, either way, the economic implications for the future are phenomenal.

So far, more than 200,000 veterans from the current Iraq or Afghanistan wars have been treated at VA centres. Twenty per cent of those brought home are suffering from serious brain or spinal injuries, or the severing of more than one limb, and a further 20 per cent from amputations, blindness or deafness, severe burns, or other dire conditions. "Every person injured on active duty is going to be a long-term cost of the war," says Bilmes. If we compare the financial ramifications of the first Gulf war to the present one, the implications become even more stark. Despite its brevity, even the 1991 Gulf war exacted a heavy toll: 48.4 per cent of veterans sought medical care, and 44 per cent filed disability claims. Eighty-eight per cent of these claims were granted, meaning that 611,729 veterans from the first Gulf war are now receiving disability benefits; a large proportion are suffering from psychiatric illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

More than a third of those returning from the current wars, too, have already been diagnosed as suffering from similar conditions. But although the VA has 207 walk-in "vet centres" and other clinics and offices throughout the US, it is a bureaucracy under siege. It has a well-deserved reputation for providing excellent healthcare for America's 24 million veterans, but is quite unable to cope with a workload that the Bush administration did not foresee.

The unknown unknowns

There is now a backlog of 400,000 claims from veterans and waiting lists of months, some of which "render . . . care virtually inaccessible", in the words of Frances Murphy, the VA's own deputy under-secretary for health. Claims are expected to hit 874,000 this year, 930,000 in 2008. Casualties returning from Iraq meanwhile outnumber other patients at Walter Reed 17 to one, and many have to be put up at nearby hotels and motels rather than in the hospital beds they desperately need. Suicide attempts are frequent; often the less wounded end up having to care for the more seriously wounded.

Since I researched this piece, the Washington Post has published a series of articles outlining the chaos at Walter Reed and elsewhere. Undercover reporters found soldiers suffering from schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress and other brain injuries, occupying rooms infested with mice and cockroaches. The ensuing furore resulted in the sacking of the general in charge. Even Bush says he is "deeply troubled" by these "unacceptable" conditions at Walter Reed, but his government has carefully avoided the issue of how much it will cost to put right these wrongs. The failure to look after returning, often traumatised troops leads to yet further hidden costs to the US economy: the consequences of unemployment, family violence, crime, alcoholism and drug abuse, for example.

The projected $2.5trn price tag also includes the costs of replacing and replenishing military equipment in use. Nearly 40 per cent of the army's equipment, according to the Washington Post, is currently deployed in Iraq; as long ago as March 2005, Rumsfeld conceded that tanks, fighting vehicles and helicopters were wearing out at six times the normal rate.

Significant quantities of equipment are being destroyed, too. The Washington Post reported last December that the army alone has lost more than 280,000 major pieces of equipment in the combat zones; the Army Times reported as long ago as February last year that 20 M1 Abram tanks, 50 Bradley fighting vehicles, 20 Stryker wheeled combat vehicles, 20 M113 armoured personnel carriers, 250 Hum vees, hundreds of mine-clearing vehicles and the like - plus more than a hundred aircraft, most of them helicopters - have been lost. Those figures have increased considerably since then as fighting has intensified. Add something between $125bn and $300bn for these unanticipated long-term costs, say Bilmes and Stiglitz.

Yet another gargantuan White House miscalculation was over the price of oil. Before his departure, Larry Lindsey told the Wall Street Journal in September 2002 that "the successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy"; the WSJ echoed his thoughts in an editorial the same day, arguing that "the best way to keep oil prices in check is a short, successful war on Iraq". In 2002, the average cost of a barrel of oil was $23.71; today, it is hovering around $50. Dick Cheney's chums in firms such as his own Halliburton - or ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron - have profited enormously, but Bilmes estimates that even if only $5 of the oil-price increase can be attributed to the Iraq war, that alone adds $150bn to the cost of war.

There are also countless imponderables that add to the bill. The deployment of hundreds of thousands of reservists depletes the economy. At present, 44 per cent of US police forces, for example, have members deployed as reservists in Iraq, and their duties have to be performed by others in America; the same goes for firefighters, medical staff, prison wardens.

Then there are the future illnesses that may well unfold. For instance, nobody knew that the notorious Agent Orange defoliant, used by the US in Vietnam from 1961-71, would turn out to have had carcinogenic and other effects on US troops. Today, there is mounting evidence that exposure to depleted uranium - used for firing anti-tank rounds from US M1 tanks and A-10 attack aircraft - can cause cancer, diabetes and birth defects. Many veterans are returning to the US with their health apparently in ruins from adverse reactions to anti-anthrax injections and/or consumption of experimental pills to counter chemical warfare agents. The long-term costs of looking after the likes of them make the cost of the actual war dead pale by comparison: spouses of deceased soldiers receive a "death gratuity" of $100,000. Troops are also given the opportunity to take out subsidised life insurance policies for up to $500,000 for dependants. In the dispassionate way economists assess such things, Bilmes and Stiglitz estimate the additional cost to the economy of the death of a young soldier - typically 25 years old - to be $6.5m.

Bilmes has become a marked woman to the Bush administration. She was invited to participate in a VA seminar on the cost of war, to be held on the last day of this month - but then was suddenly uninvited. She is no raving lefty, though, and her economic credentials are unimpeachable: she was responsible for an annual budget of $9bn in the Clinton-era commerce department. Like none other than George W Bush, she, too, holds an MBA from Harvard.

It is sobering to think how the money going down the drain in Iraq could otherwise have been spent. "For this amount of money, we could have provided health insurance for the uninsured of this country," Bilmes tells me. "We could have made social security solvent for the next three generations, and implemented all the 9/11 Commission's recommendations [to tighten domestic security]."

That kind of list goes on: the annual cost of treating all heart disease and diabetes in the United States would amount to a quarter of what the Iraq war is costing. Pre-school for every child in America would take just $35bn a year. In their main paper, Bilmes and Stiglitz come up with an even more intriguing possibility: "We could have had a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, or the developing countries, that might have succeeded in winning hearts and minds."

What a historic triumph that would have been for Bush. Instead, his legacy to generations of Americans will be a needless debt of at least $2.5trn, what his own defence secretary describes as a four-way civil war in Iraq, dangerous instability in the Middle East, and increasingly entrenched hatred of the United States throughout the world. Alas, we are likely to hear the daily roar of those C-17s as they approach Andrews Air Force Base for years to come.

The unknown price that Britain is paying

No one is counting the long-term costs of caring for injured British troops, reports Sam Alexandroni

The cost to Britain of the Iraq war, according to the Ministry of Defence, will hit £5bn at the end of this financial year. This is the figure given for direct spending on fuel, ammunition, repairs and transport; the real bill is certainly much bigger. The greatest of the uncounted costs is the financial and human toll the war is taking on the mental and physical health of British personnel serving in Iraq.

The government has not attempted to calculate the long-term cost of caring for the injured, and official statistics offer little guidance. Four thousand eight hundred personnel have been evacuated from Iraq on medical grounds but only 144 were classified as "seriously" or "very seriously" injured. What about the rest? Nobody in the MoD or NHS was able to say how many personnel who served in Iraq are being treated in Britain, or how many will require long-term medical care. The treatment costs of servicemen at NHS hospitals such as Selly Oak in Birmingham - home to the Royal Centre of Defence Medicine - are passed on to the MoD, which in turn bills the Treasury Reserve, but once a patient leaves the armed forces, ongoing treatment is paid for by the NHS.

Mental health offers similar uncertainties. So far, 2,123 troops who served in Iraq have been diagnosed with mental health problems, 328 with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); but cases take 12 years on average to surface and there is no sure cure. "We won't know for many years after the Iraq war is over how many former servicemen are suffering from psychological problems," says Toby Elliot, chief executive of the charity Combat Stress. "The MoD doesn't provide all the funds we need by a long way. We have to make up 40 per cent of our funding ourselves, and that's a problem."

Nor has anyone tried to quantify the indirect economic effects. The surge in the price of Brent crude oil from $31 a barrel at the start of 2003 to $60 today has been driven largely by increased demand, but Middle East instability affects the market and "Iraq has been factored in for years", according to the oil analyst Jean-Luc Amos. The extent to which the Iraq war has exacerbated the domestic threat of terror and made Britain less safe remains similarly ungauged. Then there are other costs barely considered. In 2002 a study commissioned by Ken Livingstone, the city's mayor, estimated that war in Iraq would cost the London economy £1bn in lost tourism alone, though there has been no post-invasion follow-up.

That no one in the British government has even attempted these calculations is worrying, but perhaps any cost-benefit analysis of the war misses the point. "In the end, if the Iraq war had brought the Iraqis a better life and us greater security, then - whatever the costs - it would seem 'worth it'," says Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King's College London. "Because it has been such a screw-up, then, even at a lower level of calculated costs, it seems like a waste."

Iraq War: Key Dates
Research by Sarah O'Connor

20 March 2003 US and Britain invade
1 May 2003 Bush announces "mission accomplished"
13 December 2003 Saddam Hussein is captured
28 April 2004 Images of US troops abusing prisoners emerge from Abu Ghraib
November 2004 US assault on Fallujah insurgents
30 January 2005 Eight million Iraqis vote in elections
July 2006 Deadliest month in Iraq: 3,438 civilians are killed
30 December 2006 Saddam Hussein is executed
10 January 2007 Bush announces 21,500 troop surge to Iraq
21 February 2007 Blair announces the withdrawal of 1,600 British troops

Iraq 2007 by numbers
Research by Rebecca Bundhun

l57,805 minimum number of Iraqi civilians reported killed since the 2003 invasion, according to the Iraq Body Count website
33% of Americans in a March 2007 poll approved of George Bush's Iraq policy
80 US soldiers killed in Iraq last month
7,100 number of UK troops currently in Iraq
135,000 number of US troops currently in Iraq
134 number of British soldiers killed in Iraq
21,500 additional troops Bush plans to deploy in the "troop surge"
28 percentage of Americans in the March poll who said the US will probably or definitely win the war

the cake under the sink, the rats in the kitchen

2007-04-18T08:29:00.000-04:00

While I was reading Commondreams.org today I came across this story about then Defense Secretary, now head of World Bank- Paul Wolfowitz's girlfriend being sent by the World Bank to Iraq in 2003 (link).

What caught my eye was the appearance of SAIC in the scenario. Remember the SAIC - Defense Secretary Robert Gates connection I drew so long ago? and the SAIC - Black Box Voting connection? and the recent Antiwar.com Charles Goyette interview I wrote about concerning SAIC's contracts in the Iraq /Afgan/Mideast Wars?

Some real journalists should be pulling the threads of this story!!!
Thank Vanity Fair and the Government Accountability Project for following the story of how our democracy has been looted by a bunch of NeoCon pirates. You don't see this on television news, now do you.

I remember a famous Neocon once said in a fit of truthiness, "If you don't want rats in the kitchen you don't store a cake under the sink." It was either Krystol or Norquist, can't recall.
I think we stored the bloody cake under the sink and the rats are in the kitchen.

Flesh eating zombies protecting the snowflake fetuses

2007-04-18T07:41:00.000-04:00

a.k.a. the Republican WarParty.

In the past two weeks TUC Radio has posted two halves of a speech by Chris Hedges, on American Fascism (link), and I listened to the .mp3 yesterday. What he said about Blackwater was particularly chilling.
The Paul Krugman article, For God's Sake, posted on CommonDreams.org (link)reiterates what Hedges is saying, as does David Michael Green's article, Dark of Heartness (link).

Coincidentally, as I was reading responses to a story on Black (Extraordinary Rendition) Sites (link) posted at CommonDreams.org, this following posted comment about the criminal, fascist Bush administration caught my attention... The GOP leadership are "Deep Ecologists"!
It could explain a lot.
(While you're there, read the Scott Ritter article.)
It brought to mind a bumper sticker I saw in the parking lot of Michigan State University that I wish I'd had last fall. It read,

'Soylent Green is People
like Devos is Amway'

The 'survival of the fittest' mentality of the right wingnuttery sometimes makes me wonder why they hate Darwinianism so intensly, but then I remember... oh right, they are in the Wizard of Oz movie. The dutiful munchkins of the GOP flock hate evolution theory, so their satanic Rovian masters twist the propaganda to fit the scenario.

The flesh-eating zombie 30 percent of Americans polled who still back Bush, Cheney and the War Party resemble something out of the Night of the Living Dead.

Okay, I go on. Here's the post I mentioned...

Clark Kent April 17th, 2007 1:57 pm
In a sense they are the deepest of the “Deep Ecologists”. They look at the population explosion problem and, through their actions, imply that the best possible solution at this time is mass murder of Iraqis, New Orleans residents, poor people without health care, underprivileged people who join the U.S. armed services, people who breathe (polluted) air, eat (tainted) food or drink (polluted) water or use (toxic, but approved) chemicals.

Their means are military action, withholding of food, health care and emergency services and neglect (African AIDS being the most obvious example). In every case, the propaganda spin is to “make it look like an accident”.

Their criterion for deciding who should live and who should die is largely based on wealth– rich live, poor die, however there is also a racist component that cannot be ignored.

Obviously, such a program of mass death could not be undertaken in a real democracy, so it has been necessary for them to undermine democracy to achieve their goals.

We can fight them, of course, but until and unless we can show them that humanity is capable of limiting itself to a sustainable population, there will probably be a thriving and passionate group of people who hold their views.

This may seem overly cynical to some, but if you make your judgement based on their actions, not their words, it’s hard to find a better explanation of it all.

Hey gang, they do it in Traverse City

2007-04-17T09:26:00.000-04:00

(Watch it... the end is a real grabber.)

watchword: decentralization

2007-04-17T09:04:00.000-04:00

The only hope I see in the world is in small decentralized problem solvers who do their thing away from corrupt governments and power structures.
Coincidentally here is a book about just such a concept(link).

Power to the people.
Thanks for the pointer, Bioneers.

Along the same lines, today I am investing in a local farmer.
I'm buying a share in a local, organic CSA.

Paranoid or Prophet?

2007-04-16T12:23:00.000-04:00

So... why DID the FBI have a file-full of his mail?
Project Artichoke?

And it all begs the big question of our day... if they can spy on American citizens, then why can't American citizens read their e-mails, read their mail, listen to their phone calls?

A "handful" of staff in Karl Rove's office destroyed 5,000 pieces of e-mail, thereby breaking the law (don't make me look it up, it's something like the Whitehouse Communications Act)and our representatives still have to wait around for subpenas?

Hey, Senator Pat Leahy, how about dashing off a National Security letter?

It's long, but worth every minute...

"you need to find a little gang"

2007-04-15T16:53:00.000-04:00

Posting PART of a great interview with Vonnegut.
October 7, 2005 PBS program NOW, with host David Brancaccio.
So many quotable moments...
"my dream of America was great public schools..."
I heard the complete interview, with his notable gang reference repeated on the Itunes podcast of NOW. Check it out.

remembering a national treasure

2007-04-14T17:08:00.000-04:00

Strange Weather Lately
By Kurt Vonnegut
May 9, 2003
The following is adapted from a Clemens Lecture presented in April (2003) for the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut.

First things first: I want it clearly understood that this mustache I’m wearing is my father’s mustache. I should have brought his photograph. My big brother Bernie, now dead, a physical chemist who discovered that silver iodide can sometimes make it snow or rain, he wore it, too.

Speaking of weather: Mark Twain said some readers complained that there wasn’t enough weather in his stories. So he wrote some weather, which they could insert wherever they thought it would help some.

Mark Twain was said to have shed a tear of gratitude and incredulousness when honored for his writing by Oxford University in England. And I should shed a tear, surely, having been asked at the age of 80, and because of what I myself have written, to speak under the auspices of the sacred Mark Twain House here in Hartford.

What other American landmark is as sacred to me as the Mark Twain House? The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln were country boys from Middle America, and both of them made the American people laugh at themselves and appreciate really important, really moral jokes.

I note that construction has stopped of a Mark Twain Museum here in Hartford —behind the carriage house of the Mark Twain House at 351 Farmington Avenue.

Work persons have been sent home from that site because American “conservatives,” as they call themselves, on Wall Street and at the head of so many of our corporations, have stolen a major fraction of our private savings, have ruined investors and employees by means of fraud and outright piracy.

Shock and awe.

And now, having installed themselves as our federal government, or taken control of it from outside, they have squandered our public treasury and then some. They have created a public debt of such appalling magnitude that our descendants, for whom we had such high hopes, will come into this world as poor as church mice.

Shock and awe.

What are the conservatives doing with all the money and power that used to belong to all of us? They are telling us to be absolutely terrified, and to run around in circles like chickens with their heads cut off. But they will save us. They are making us take off our shoes at airports. Can anybody here think of a more hilarious practical joke than that one?

Smile, America. You’re on Candid Camera.

And they have turned loose a myriad of our high-tech weapons, each one costing more than a hundred high schools, on a Third World country, in order to shock and awe human beings like us, like Adam and Eve, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

The other day I asked former Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton what he thought of our great victory over Iraq, and he said, “Mohammed Ali versus Mr. Rogers.”

What are conservatives? They are people who will move heaven and earth, if they have to, who will ruin a company or a country or a planet, to prove to us and to themselves that they are superior to everybody else, except for their pals. They take good care of their pals, keep them out of jail—and so on.

Conservatives are crazy as bedbugs. They are bullies.

Shock and awe.

Class war? You bet.

They have proved their superiority to admirers of Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain and Jesus of Nazareth, with an able assist from television, making inconsequential our protests against their war.

What has happened to us? We have suffered a technological calamity. Television is now our form of government.

On what grounds did we protest their war? I could name many, but I need name only one, which is common sense.

Be that as it may, construction of the Mark Twain Museum will sooner or later be resumed. And I, the son and grandson of Indiana architects, seize this opportunity to suggest a feature which I hope will be included in the completed structure, words to be chiseled into the capstone over the main entrance.

Here is what I think would be fun to put up there, and Mark Twain loved fun more than anything. I have tinkered with something famous he said, which is: “Be good and you will be lonesome.” That is from Following the Equator. OK?

So envision what a majestic front entrance the Mark Twain Museum will have someday. And imagine that these words have been chiseled into the noble capstone and painted gold:

be good and you will be lonesome most places, but not here, not here.
One of the most humiliated and heartbroken pieces Twain ever wrote was about the slaughter of 600 Moro men, women and children by our soldiers during our liberation of the people of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. Our brave commander was Leonard Wood, who now has a fort named after him. Fort Leonard Wood.

What did Abraham Lincoln have to say about such American imperialist wars? Those are wars which, on one noble pretext or another, actually aim to increase the natural resources and pools of tame labor available to the richest Americans who have the best political connections.

And it is almost always a mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln in a speech about something or somebody else. He always steals the show. I am about to quote him.

Lincoln was only a Congressman when he said in 1848 what I am about to echo. He was heartbroken and humiliated by our war on Mexico, which had never attacked us.

We were making California our own, and a lot of other people and properties, and doing it as though butchering Mexican soldiers who were only defending their homeland against invaders wasn’t murder.

What other stuff besides California? Well, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming.

The person congressman Lincoln had in mind when he said what he said was James Polk, our president at the time. Abraham Lincoln said of Polk, his president, our armed forces’ commander-in-chief: “Trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory, that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood —that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy, he plunged into war.”

Holy smokes! I almost said, “Holy shit!” And I thought I was a writer!

Do you know we actually captured Mexico City during the Mexican War? Why isn’t that a national holiday? And why isn’t the face of James Polk up on Mount Rushmore, along with Ronald Reagan’s?

What made Mexico so evil back in the 1840s, well before our Civil War, is that slavery was illegal there. Remember the Alamo?

My great-grandfather’s name was Clemens Vonnegut. Small world, small world. This piquant coincidence is not a fabrication. Clemens Vonnegut called himself a “freethinker,” an antique word for humanist. He was a hardware merchant in Indianapolis.

So, 120 years ago, say, there was one man who was both Clemens and Vonnegut. I would have liked being such a person a lot. I only wish I could have been such a person tonight.

I claim no blood relationship with Samuel Clemens of Hannibal, Missouri. “Clemens,” as a first name, is, I believe, like the name “Clementine,” derived from the adjective “clement.” To be clement is to be lenient and compassionate, or, in the case of weather, perfectly heavenly.

So there’s weather again.

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Crafting a new story for the attention deficit nation

2007-04-11T13:17:00.000-04:00

Iraq
- q + n= Iran
- n= IRA

The news of the Iranian roadside bombs in Iraq that kill our troops you are being innundated with is just another new BS story.

I predict is another Jessica Lynch- Pat Tillman Potemkin type propaganda story, crafted to rouse the Attention Deficit Nation.
Don't trust anything the War Party says on the War Media.
Don't you remember, the story has been hinted around for months now.
I recall hearing it mentioned briefly by the ABC writer- embedded reporter on Diane Rheme's show last week.

But the REAL story is that it is another covert provication to war on Iran.

Dubya is spending millions on propaganda aimed at you and me. Are you awake enough to catch it?

Just Google it for yourself... IRA and IED. These are the same bombs that covert Brit and US spooks taught the IRA to use in their violence, as reported in the Guardian newspaper.

Dear Diane Rehm - a big lie repeated, and you just sat there

2007-04-04T10:53:00.000-04:00

Your guest, a reporter for ABC News, repeated a "big lie".

Of course, she's a corporate, imbedded reporter. Take those with a grain of salt.

The Big Lie your guest repeated, discussed by Dr. Les Roberts in the following interview, is that the new British study of the famous John-Hopkins study on civilian Iraqi deaths found that the original study may have been too conservative in its numbers.
The big lie she mouthed was that yes, the Brit scientists (of whom nobody could question their expertise) said the numbers were determined to be "wrong".
Some propaganda is easy - lie by ommission.

Not that the numbers were conservative, but that they were wrong... implying they were perhaps excessive or done sloppily.

The study of the study said the numbers were too small.
Dr. Roberts was in Rwanda after the genocide. He said the numbers of dead innocent people in Iraq equal or exceed the numbers of dead in the Rwandan genocide.
Chew on that.

Antiwar Radio: Charles Goyette Interviews Les Roberts
Thursday, March 29th, 2007 in News, War crimes, Antiwar Radio, Iraq by Charles Goyette (link listen)

Dr. Les Roberts from Columbia University discusses the famous Johns Hopkins/Lancet studies of “excess civilian deaths” in Iraq since 2003, the UK government scientists who told Tony Blair that Lancet had, if anything, underestimated the dead at 655,000 (more than the Rwandan genocide of 1994), the deliberate efforts of the U.S. government to suppress numbers of the dead.

MP3 here. (16:49)
Les Roberts, PhD, holds has a Masters degree in public health from Tulane University and a Ph.D. in environmental engineering from Johns Hopkins. He did a post-doctorate fellowship in epidemiology at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention where he worked for 4 years. In 1994, he worked as an epidemiologist for the World Health Organization in Rwanda during their civil war. He previously served as the Director of Health Policy at the International Rescue Committee. He is a lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering where he teaches each fall. He teaches a class entitled Water and Sanitation in Complex Emergencies and the 7-week quantitative component of the Program’s Investigative Methods in Complex Emergencies course.

Dear Senator John McCain

2007-04-03T12:46:00.000-04:00

A person has to ask themself, why would John McCain indulge in such fantastic absurdism.
'Walking safely in Baghdad', indeed.

Put two and two together. The guy is running for Presdient... and hence he covets MONEY, like the Anointed Mitt and the Predestined Hillary.

Well, coincidentally, this weekend I heard a great interview of Donald Bartlett and James Steele by Charles Goyette on Antiwar Radio (link & listen) all about their recent article in Vanity Fair about SAIC, the biggest military contractor in history. (Remember during the confirmation hearings I wrote about SAIC in reference to Robert Gates, our new Secretary of Defense.)
SAIC, Halliburton, Blackwater, B&R, CACI, Bechtel, are the biggest piggies on the American taxpayer's teat.
And they pay war candidates to run for president.

For further investigation, Bartlett and Steele should write another investigative article about SAIC's contracts with the elections commission and Diebold.

2007-04-03T09:45:00.000-04:00

kookookachoo

kool stuff

2007-04-03T09:30:00.000-04:00

neocon wall chart 1 and neocon wall chart 2, theocrat edition from http://oddlots.digitalspace.net/ARX/downloads/neoconned.html
For lots of info to elucidate the charts, check out the accompanying downloads.

2007-04-03T09:20:00.000-04:00

All about the nuclear bunker buster, animated. We can only "hope" for a good strong north wind.

Dear Mr. Blair

2007-04-03T08:54:00.000-04:00

Blair: Next 2 Days With Iran Are Crucial
By DAVID STRINGER, Associated Press Writer
Tue Apr 3, 2007
LONDON - The next two days are "fairly critical" to resolving the dispute over a seized British navy crew, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday, after Iran's chief international negotiator offered a new approach to end the standoff with Tehran.

So the primo diplomats of the civilized world can't solve a map dispute.
Sounds like a set-up to me.

Tony Poodle Dog Blair has a choice here for his final act. Let the neo-cons he has always kneeled to take us to another war on ginned up pretext, or retire and go on a sweet vacation for the rest of his life.
What is it about these egomaniacs?

It's common knowlege, isn't it, Tony has a cushy job in line with Rupert Murdoch after his reign of error is over.

Some Russian rag has leaked that Good Friday is the date.
I heard somewhere else that the Eisenhower is going to be replaced by the Nimitz, thereby at overlap time it would be auspicious for Dubya and his wolfpack to go blood simple.
Come on, Tony, stand on yer hind legs and make peace.

http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/timeline/flash_index.htm

Still relevant, because the same bad actors are still pulling the strings:
Bringing on 'World War III'
by Bill Berkowitz
WorkingForChange
URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=21146
07.27.06

If you thought that a global conflagration on the order of a world war was more the stuff of Biblical prophecy, science fiction and apocalyptic end-of- times novels, think again.
For years, U.S. neoconservatives have been ratcheting up the rhetoric -- mostly in small gatherings and on partisan Web sites -- claiming that terrorist activities around the world constituted the initial stages of a new world war.
But during the past two weeks, with the Israeli/ Hezbollah conflict in full swing, Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, is using any media platform available to him to launch a campaign aimed at convincing the public that the United States is engaged in World War III.
Gingrich made national headlines when he claimed while discussing the situation in the Middle East during an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" on July 16 that the United States should be "helping the Lebanese government have the strength to eliminate Hezbollah as a military force."
A day earlier, the Seattle Times reported that during a fundraising trip to the state of Washington, Gingrich used the term World War III, while at the same time mixing in a little partisan politics, acknowledging that he was his concerned about the Republican Party's prospects in the fall elections.
"This is World War III," Gingrich said. "Israel wouldn't leave southern Lebanon as long as there was a single missile there. I would go in and clean them all out and I would announce that any Iranian airplane trying to bring missiles to re-supply them would be shot down. This idea that we have this one-sided war where the other team gets to plan how to kill us and we get to talk, is nuts."
Gingrich also maintained that the use of the term "World War III" could re-energise the base of the Republican Party. He pointed out that public opinion can change "the minute you use the language" of World War III. The message then, he said, is "okay, if we're in the third world war, which side do you think should win?"
Gingrich, a regular Fox News Channel contributor also appeared on the network's "Hannity & Colmes" program, and restated his World War III contention.
In a recent column, the Rev. Jerry Falwell echoed Gingrich's comments: "... I believe we are on the verge of a war without borders, one that could bring bouts of violence and bloodshed into our lives. Remember that Iran's Ahmadinejad has not only threatened to destroy Israel, but has also threatened to nuke the United States."
While Gingrich's media tour definitely thrust him back into the national political spotlight, it may have also given the public a sneak peek into the Republican Party's political/marketing strategy for the November congressional elections: If the war on terrorism doesn't create a fearful enough climate amongst voters, why not ratchet it up by mentioning the specter of a World War III?
Gingrich, who has also been testing the waters for a 2008 run at the presidency, was not the first conservative to use the phrase World War III. Media Matters for America, a Web site devoted to "monitoring, analysing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media," recently documented a number of World War III references by a gaggle of cable television's conservative talking heads.
On the July 13 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, host Bill O'Reilly said "World War III ... I think we're in it."
On the same day's edition of MSNBC's Tucker, a graphic read: "On the verge of World War III?"
"CNN Headline News host Glenn Beck began his program on July 12 with a discussion with former CIA officer Robert Baer by saying 'We've got World War III to fight,' while also warning of 'the impending apocalypse,'" Media Matters for America noted.
"Beck and Baer had a similar discussion on July 13, in which Beck said: 'I absolutely know that we need to prepare ourselves for World War III. It is here.'"
President Bush mentioned World War III in May, telling CNBC that the action taken by the passengers on the hijacked flight 93 on Sep. 11, 2001 was the "first counter-attack to World War III."
Bush said that he agreed with the description by David Beamer, whose son Todd died in the crash, in an April Wall Street Journal commentary that the act was "our first successful counter-attack in our homeland in this new global war -- World War III."
Hyping World War III isn't new to conservatives. Some have even argued that the real World War III was the Cold War against the Soviet Union, and that now the United States is engaged in World War IV.
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neoconservative think tank that in the late 1990s was advocating regime change in Iraq and has consistently promoted a muscular U.S. foreign policy, was one of the groups that used the term World War III to describe the Cold War.
In April 2003, at a teach-in at the University of California, Los Angeles sponsored by Americans for Victory Over Terrorism, R. James Woolsey, a former CIA director and founding member of PNAC, told the audience that "This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us; hopefully not the full four-plus decades of the Cold War."
Woolsey pointed out that the religious rulers of Iran, the "fascists" of Iraq and Syria, and terrorist groups like al Qaeda were the main targets of the new war. But PNAC and Woolsey's labeling of the Cold War as World War III and the current war against terrorism World War IV may have been more a case of premature elocution than a precise reading of the times. That construct "might sell well inside the Beltway, but out in the countryside where the younger generation can't recall the Cold War it doesn't do much," John Stauber, the founder and executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy and the author of the forthcoming book, "The Best War Ever," told me in an email.
"The Cold War was the best thing that ever happened to American capitalism, and the collapse of the Soviet Union was a disaster for the Eisenhower-named military-industrial complex," Stauber pointed out.
"The strategists among the pro-war right jumped all over 9/11; an endless, secret, war against a foreign enemy bent on terrorism and acquiring weapons of mass destruction is an even better scenario for American militarists than the Cold War."
"Calling it World War III is sound packaging," he said. "You've got to call it something and five years after 9/11 with Osama [bin Laden] still roaming free and Iraq an American quagmire, and the Republican Party in danger of losing control of Congress, this ploy makes marketing sense."
If the Republican Party brain-trust -- read, Karl Rove -- determines that labeling the Democrats "cut and runners," "weak on terrorism," or that they are incapable of understanding the reality of the dangerous world we live in, does not appear to be resonating with voters, the term World War III just might be put in play.

...Onward Christian Soldiers

Okay, NPR, here's what I wanna know

2007-04-02T13:00:00.000-04:00

I can understand this shite from Bill O'Reilly, the schmuck.
But why are you reporting so persistently on the fifteen Brit sailors?
We can see them eating, speaking, clothed.
They are not being tortured, no scars, no organ failure.
Can you say that for the unknown number of people our secret police swept off the streets of other countries and "extrodinarily renditioned" since the Clinton administration.
How many of those people were able to confirm to their families that they are still alive or in good condition?
Read about Ghost Prisoners.
http://hrw.org/reports/2007/us0207/2.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_detainee

We both have broken the rules of the Geneva Conventions. Iran by crossing a few minor points such as showing prisoners on tape...
But my America, overwhelmingly so.... so many treaties Dubya has smashed.
We, my fellow Americans are the war criminals, by any standard.

You saw the GPS points in the dispute, didn't you. How the story changed and then the GPS supposedly was "proof" that the sailors were picked up in Iraqi territory.
Did you fall for it?

Here is a little "tell" that illustrates the propaganda technique of what you are seeing on the MSM, gang.

The maps we see on for instance FOX show the American propaganda version of where the 12 mile limit in the border dispute. The American map is taken by the American press as a "given".
Have you seen the GPS dots explained using an Iranian propaganda map? No.

You are supposed to believe the high technology of GPS marks, but they don't mention the the map you are being shown is what is actually the dispute, NOT the place where the sailors were picked up!

Sometimes we believe thing that aren't true, just because they are artfully presented as "given".

Here's an idea! maybe Iran should fly the fifteen British to Syria, after all, Damascus is one of Dubya's prisoner handoffs of choice.

more more more, mahr

2007-03-31T18:32:00.001-04:00

How to talk to a Reptilublican

2007-03-31T18:21:00.000-04:00

by Bill Maher

teach your children well, or learn from them

2007-03-31T18:16:00.000-04:00

the Impeach Bush Club

saturday nite dance music

2007-03-31T17:59:00.000-04:00

from a perennial favorite, Depeche Mode...

2007-03-27T11:25:00.000-04:00

Source: Economic Policy Institute

traitors should be impeached, at least

2007-03-26T08:11:00.000-04:00

They Were Talking about Wilson’s Wife before Wilson’s Article Came Out
by MARGIE BURNS

Why were there all these administration colloquies about Wilson’s wife circulated before Wilson’s article came out? Retaliation is too simple an answer.Every major news outlet reporting on the CIA leak and the Libby trial has taken the line that CIA analyst Valerie Plame was outed in retaliation for a column by her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, published on July 6, 2003. But unrefuted testimony and documents in the trial of I. Lewis Libby, formerly Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, reveal that administration discussion of Mrs. Wilson, her CIA status and Wilson’s trip began several weeks before Wilson’s column appeared.
If Wilson’s New York Times op-ed column, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” had set off the chain of events that resulted in exposing Plame, those events would have begun on July 6 of that year.

Instead the perjury and obstruction trial of Libby, convicted on four of five counts, has demonstrated that tense colloquies about Mrs. Wilson took place in the administration substantially before Wilson’s column came out:

May 29, 2003 – Libby calls then-Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, according to Grossman’s testimony, asking how and why Joe Wilson was sent on a trip to Niger about uranium.

“late May and early June, 2003” -- Grossman gives oral interim reports to Libby that Wilson was the ambassador who went to Niger (mentioned but not named in a May 6 New York Times piece by Nicholas Kristof, “Missing in Action: Truth”).

June 9, 2003 -- Grossman has a conversation with Wilson, who is “upset” that Condoleezza Rice had claimed on "Meet the Press" that the White House was unaware of doubts about the Niger uranium story. (In his book, Wilson says this conversation “elicited the suggestion that I might have to write the story myself”; he got in touch with the New York Times the same day. p.332.)

June 9, 2003 – classified documents from CIA are faxed to the Office of the Vice President to Libby and colleague John Hannah, mentioning the Wilson trip but not naming Wilson.

June 10, 2003 – a classified State Department memo written by State’s Bureau of Intelligence & Research (INR) gives Grossman the background on Wilson’s Niger trip, names Valerie Wilson as Wilson’s wife and as “a CIA WMD manager.” The memo, like previous memos, also debunks the Niger uranium story.

June 11, 2003 – Robert L. Grenier, longtime CIA official and “Iraq mission manager” and “point person for Iraq” in 2002 and 2003, receives a phone call from Libby, then Libby summons him from a meeting with the CIA Director to follow up about Wilson; Grenier tells Libby that Wilson’s wife is in CIA. (Grenier now works for Kroll Associates.)

June 11/12, 2003 – Marc Grossman has a “30-second discussion” about Mrs. Wilson with Libby, according to Grossman’s testimony.

June 12, 2003 – Libby is informed by Cheney in a phone call that Wilson’s wife is in CIA (handwritten note: “CP: his wife works in that div”). Walter Pincus' Washington Post article that day mentions the trip but not Wilson by name.

June 12, 2003 – David Addington, Cheney’s government lawyer, receives the same notes from Libby’s office mentioning that Wilson’s wife worked in the Counter-Proliferation Division (typed copy).

June 13, 2003 – Richard L. Armitage, then Deputy Secretary of State and formerly a PNAC signatory boosting war with Iraq, tells Bob Woodward in a taped interview, with expletives, that Mrs. Wilson works for CIA. Bogus macho-man duet suggests that Mrs. Wilson sent Wilson on the Niger trip.

June 14, 2003 – CIA daily briefer Craig Schmall briefs Libby at Libby’s home; notes question about Wilson (“ex-amb”) and the Niger trip; notes Wilson and Valerie Wilson by name.

June 23, 2003 – Libby has a discussion with Judith Miller, mentions Wilson’s wife at CIA. (Miller had returned to the U.S. from Iraq on June 8.)

July 6, 2003 – Joseph Wilson’s op-ed criticizing the Niger story appears in the New York Times.
Additionally, according to a statement by Bob Woodward in the Washington Post, Woodward brought a list including the terms “yellowcake” (unprocessed uranium) and “Joe Wilson’s wife” with him when he met with another official on June 20, spoke with Libby on the phone on June 23, and then met with Libby on June 27. Woodward’s statement leaves unclear whether the terms were dealt with in these communications, all of which occurred before the July 6 op-ed.
So why were there all these colloquies in the administration, about Wilson’s wife, before Wilson’s article came out?

Retaliation is too simple an answer. Wilson had appeared on television expressing doubts about the war and about Iraq WMD from January through April, 2003. He pulled his punches—undoubtedly wondering whether the White House might actually have some evidence—but still made plenty of public comments that could have provoked a White House counterattack. There is no sign of one until May 2003, when Wilson made few public remarks.

Nor does the administration seem to have tipped its hand to the Wilsons beforehand to stop Wilson from going public.

What did happen in regard to Niger uranium—before Kristof’s piece—is that Seymour Hersh published a devastating New Yorker article, “Who Lied to Whom?" in March, which reappeared on April 22 as "Iraq Post Mortem” in the British magazine Prospect. The article emphasized the blatantly forged Niger documents about “yellowcake.” (Judith Miller, for one, seems to have backed down on Iraq WMD immediately following the definitive debunking in Prospect.) Did the administration simply launch a pre-emptive strike against Wilson, fearing that his going public on the “mushroom cloud” would be the last straw? With its usual tin ear, did it fear that Joe Wilson and Seymour Hersh would join forces? Or did it go for a two-fer, moving to disrupt analysis in the WMD unit at the CIA where Mrs. Wilson worked?

By the time Wilson’s column appeared, his wife’s name and CIA connection had already been leaked to Bob Woodward of the Post and Judith Miller of the Times—two of the most famous reporters in the U.S.—for 23 days and 13 days, respectively.Armitage, Woodward’s source, is another longtime Cheney-Rumsfeld man since the “Team B” days of previous GOP administrations.
Going into the trial, I too thought of the CIA leak as retaliation for Wilson’s column and took the same line in previous postings, like most other writers. Joseph Wilson’s book, The Politics of Truth, takes the same tack. But Wilson did not have access to the behind-the-scenes discussions about his wife now revealed publicly. Retaliation there was, in spades, but retaliation cannot have been the whole story. Theorists who believe the aim was partly to disable the Counter-Proliferation Division in CIA where Valerie Plame worked may be right.

Margie Burns [link to her blog at margieburns.com] is a freelance journalist in the DC area. A previous version of this article was posted at www.bradblog.com.

Jeb resurfaces from the swamp

2007-03-23T11:01:00.000-04:00

Jeb Bush Denied Honor at U. of Florida
By Associated Press
Sat Mar 24

GAINESVILLE, Fla. - University of Florida President Bernie Machen says he was "tremendously disappointed" with the school's Faculty Senate vote to deny former Gov. Jeb Bush an honorary degree.

The Senate voted 38-28 Thursday against giving the honorary degree to Bush, who left office in January.
"Jeb Bush has been a great friend of the University of Florida," Machen said Friday, adding that the Senate's action is "unheard of."

Some faculty expressed concern about Bush's record in higher education.

"I really don't feel this is a person who has been a supporter of UF," Kathleen Price, associate dean of library and technology at the school's Levin College of Law, told The Gainesville Sun after the vote.
Bush's approval of three new medical schools during his tenure has diluted resources, Price told the newspaper.
Bush has also been criticized for his "One Florida" proposal, an initiative that ended race-based admissions programs at state universities.

(...)
University officials said they could not recall any precedent for the Senate rejecting the nominees put forth by the Faculty Senate's Honorary Degrees, Distinguished Alumnus Awards and Memorials Committee. The committee determines whether nominees deserve consideration according to standards that include "eminent distinction in scholarship or high distinction in public service."
"The committee endorsed him," Machen said. "It is unheard of that a faculty committee would look at candidates, make recommendations and then (those candidates) be overturned by the Senate." (...)
==================================

Along the same subject lines (the Imperial Bush Dynasty, not education)...
Remember a few years ago, Daddy Bush's big donor, Rev. Sun Yung Moon took his center of operations to Brazil?
Remember Dubya sending the twinset to South America for photo ops, and buying a ranch in Paraguay?
Paraguay is one of the last old time fascist countries left in South America, and, just sayin' here, would be prime territory for a Blackwater style paramilitary jumping off point for covert operations to cause problems, such as the Bush Crime Family speciality... provacation... in the neighborhood.

Good for the arms dealer- drug dealer connection that neoconservatives find such personal wealth in, and which keeps America politically so dependent on the established system of militarism and security.

After all, America's biggest export is not automobiles, it's arms.

A factoid from this is hell:
The Bush dynasty is going from oil to ethanol.

Daddy Bush's Carlyle is dipping its dipstick into the agriculture end of ethanol.

Remember Dubya's Big biofuel agreement he made with Brazil's President Lula during his south America victory tour last week?
Any future for Brazilian ethanol will be undermined by the US 53-cent a gallon tariff we have on ethanol.
Lula and Brazil would like to see that disappear, but it won't, so the positives from this will all be pure political propaganda for the lapdog mainstream media to say that Bush is doing somethng positive to wean us from our oil addiction.
Yeah, right, why would the 'dealer' wreck his own business.

Keeping all this in mind, think about the following...

Fact from Hell (from the This is Hell radio program):

Guess who is the co-chair of the interamerican ethanol commission an organization that promotes the use of ethanol in America?
Answer: Brother Jeb Bush.

Red state update on Al Gore

a new link

2007-03-23T10:04:00.000-04:00

This Is Hell, a cool, progressive, entertaining and informative, weekly Saturday morning radio show out of Evanston. This is hell streams live, or you can listen to the archived .mp3s, either on Itunes or by download.

Last weekend's interview on the failure of U.S. neoliberal macroeconomic policy in Latin and South America is great.
You won't learn this from the American press or mainstream media.
Listen and learn!
Center for Economic and Policy Research (http://www.cepr.net) co-director Mark Weisbrot who wrote the article "President Bush's Trip to Latin America is All About Denial."
It's numero uno on the archive page.