Dear Sarah Chayes

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

Nuke 'em Day

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.

the downward spiral of repetitive history. 1969

Chomsky eats lunch.